RE: Ken Jacobs

Mladen, that was probably EOUG 1995.  

That conference was famous for running on "Italian time" which created the unprecedented arrival of Larry for his satellite call with Ray Lane in front of the entire attendance early with respect to the actual start time of the session.  

Several other things made that conference memorable, but Ken wanting company to taste a variety of Cognac was a real highlight.  

Rest in peace Ken.  

6.2(Vax only), 7.0, and 7.1 OPS was built on vendor a specific lock manager because that worked reasonably on VAX and fast enough network cards between smp hosts were still stratospheric in price. Application affinity was required for anything non-trivial and arranging for SEQ$ to be one row per block was required for a lot of Configurable Off the Shelf (COTS) applications that had been built misunderstanding sequences.  

"Cache fusion" in 8 was read only of memory cache via network cards and spawned the notion in 9i that you didn't have to change anything gave us the name change you mentioned on the *theory* you could scale horizontally without application or configuration change.  

That, in turn, led to Mogens' famous YPDNR paper (which was completely accurate describing most pretty doggone large workloads of the era as more efficient on a single host.)  

Tragically, there was no companion paper "If you can't fit your workload on the biggest SMP you can buy, Oracle RAC is the best game in town" and one of the worst ripples in User Group/Oracle relations ensued.  

Again, rest in peace, Ken.  

mwf

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Mladen Gogala
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 7:17 PM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Ken Jacobs  

May he rest in piece. I have met him once, on Oracle user group in Florence, in the late 80's or early 90's. It's been a long time ago and I don't remember the exact dates. I have also seen him on stage on the famous conference in Zurich, when he was announcing Oracle 6.2 on VAX clusters. For those who don't remember, Oracle 6.2 changed the name in version 7i to "Oracle Parallel Server" or OPS for short. Ken Jacobs was instrumental in developing OPS and knew it better than anybody else. in Oracle 9i OPS changed the name to "Really Annoying Configuration" or RAC for short. To his credit, Ken Jacobs didn't have much to do with CRS and ASM, which are monstrosities under the hood of any RAC system. Again, for those who don't know, ASM was developed to stop competitors from using Oracle's cluster technology. That is why the open source OCFS was ultimately abandoned. Oracle needed something proprietary and they got it with ASM.

Then, there was a guy who has developed Exadata and then left to EMC where he developed Greenplum, an Exadata killer. He is the only Oracle Ace ever to be stripped of his title. But that's another story. Hopefully, he will be alive and well for years to come. These days, he works for AWS. I mentioned him because in his early years he has also developed one of the first cluster file systems after DEC, called "Polyserve" which was way, way better than OCFS.

On 2/17/21 4:12 PM, Clay Jackson (cjackson) wrote:

• Forwarded message --------- From: Date: Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 12:27 AM Subject: News about Ken Jacobs To:

Those of you who had anything to do with Oracle Database back in the early 1980's through 2010 likely crossed paths with or at least had heard of Ken Jacobs, Oracle's very own Dr. DBA. Ken formed the inaugural Database PM team in the late '80s and went on to hold other strategic roles before retiring from Oracle
<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblogs.ora
cle.com%2Fopal%2Fken-jacobss-farewell-at-oracle&data=04%7C01%7CClay.Jackson% 40quest.com%7C16b4a55a707b424a648b08d8d387c6c6%7C91c369b51c9e439c989c1867ec6 06603%7C0%7C0%7C637491927399334904%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwM DAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=e5wPDs2eFCLw8 4%2F5asEm2jaEkZbMcDMMc0ppJG9g0SU%3D&reserved=0> in 2010.  

Sadly, Ken suffered a pulmonary embolism and passed away last Friday at the age of 71.  

If you would like to pay tribute to Ken, please join his virtual memorial service this Sunday Feb. 21st at 2pm MST / 1pm PST:

Zoom URL =
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83514012372?pwd=WXVyRWVwS25vazQ1UEQ3ZWNiSEZQUT09
<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fus02web.z
oom.us%2Fj%2F83514012372%3Fpwd%3DWXVyRWVwS25vazQ1UEQ3ZWNiSEZQUT09&data=04%7C 01%7CClay.Jackson%40quest.com%7C16b4a55a707b424a648b08d8d387c6c6%7C91c369b51 c9e439c989c1867ec606603%7C0%7C0%7C637491927399344861%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d 8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&s data=KBwNPHetzfsMu3qWBgj3bSABsvkrG%2B9ZxeVzXud9cmw%3D&reserved=0>

Passcode = 863840  

Feel free to pass on the zoom details to others in the Oracle community who may want to participate in this remembrance of a wonderful person gone too soon.    

Clay Jackson

Database Solutions Sales Engineer  

<https://nam05.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.quest
.com%2Fsolutions%2Fdatabase-performance-monitoring%2F&data=02%7C01%7CClay.Ja ckson%40quest.com%7C6c57a6f83b6c490b3b4708d83edb5e24%7C91c369b51c9e439c989c1 867ec606603%7C0%7C0%7C637328459211276950&sdata=QId%2B4IzV9yh9ogPm8bagnDkPxeB ziolrNZGcYO8%2FrYk%3D&reserved=0>

 <mailto:clay.jackson_at_quest.com> clay.jackson_at_quest.com

office 949-754-1203 mobile 425-802-9603    

-- 
Mladen Gogala
Database Consultant
https://dbwhisperer.wordpress.com









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