OTNYatra - A new experience

It's the first time I'm attending the OTNYatra organised by All India Oracle User Group at Bangalore. I'm making my mind to attend the show as to get to know what happens in these sort of activities/programs conducted. I'm also planning to present papers on Oracle technology in the near future but for that I need to know what happens in there. So I booked myself/registered in the early bird offer.
As the day 24th April is nearing, I had some health issues that I was not feeling well and couldn't go to work from 2 days before the event and this bothered me a lot. I made myself prepared that in any case I shouldn't miss this event, the reason being it happens in a place where I currently reside (I don't have to travel long), I'm curious on what is happening in these events and important is to network with fellow Oracle enthusiasts/lovers.
I made it to the venue on the day, the 24th April just as the event starts.. (I'm 5 minutes late ;)). Registered myself and got a seat in the big auditorium so that I can see what's happening.

Experiences

There were a bunch of Oracle ACEs and Oracle technology geeks ready to give their presentations and once the initial formalities completed, the presentations began.
I have attended wonderful and excellent sessions of Riyaj Shamsudeen where he presented internals

Riyaj getting ready

of Cache fusion and performance tuning, neat and quick with the excellent demo which I loved. He is playing with data and servers as it seemed the servers loved him. They(the data) just obey him as he is "the master". Well everyone likes the data to obey those who dictates it. ;) Mind, he is doing live demo...
Next comes the session from Nilesh Agarwal, Consultant Technical Lead at Oracle in Enterprise Manager on how to make use of EM12c/EM13c for performance management which is of useful with crisp points.
We also had an electrifying and energetic presentation from Hariharaputhran Vaithinathan which is on SQL tuning proven methodologies.

Electrifying Hariharaputhran

Well the session is post lunch and guess what? Nobody slept in his session with the room fully packed. Hats off to the presentation style..
Another session from Nassyam Basha on GDS. This was one of the useful session again as it tells me we have something called GDS, what it's use, how to configure and how easily one can manage the services globally.

Nassyam with GDS

There were other sessions taking place in parallel on other rooms with Connor Mcdonald (the current AskTom), Biju Thomas, Saurabh Gupta, Pravin Takpire presenting their articles to name a few.
The expert panel where all the speakers on the day answers to the questions fired by the audience and yeah, this session is very informative as some of the experts are part of Oracle beta program so we can get the news from them in advance if any..

Informative chat with Connor

All the sessions I have attended gives me lot of ideas and courage and number of points to be noted on how to stage present and how to prepare slides if one wants to.. They becomes an starting point to observe when someone is in plan of participating in the future events. The networking here is good. It is nice to see the faces I saw on Facebook or Twitter in person and have chats and it gives more pleasure when we identify each other without introducing ourselves. There comes the joy in this event. The food provided is enjoyable and the tea breaks are well timed so that participants don't feel too much into technical where they can break out to fresh up for further sessions.. We also get a OTN Yatra T- Shirt, shouldn't forget to mention ;)

Suggestions

I can say I'm satisfied with the day, yes my day was totally productive but there are a few disappointments that I had.

1. As this event is for networking, I find less time to actually network with people. We had total

   

   Networking Tea Break

   of 2 tea breaks of 20 minutes and a hour time of lunch. One may feel this is a good time but as a personal opinion I felt this is really a very short time. It would have better we had a session by name such as "Know Others" or "Network fellows", etc.. where people can share on stage their current status and future plans with fun activities included..
2. The technical sessions are scheduled of 50 minutes each. Participants are expected to present themselves in 50 minutes duration. This is too short as one can only give a very high level "know what's?" and "know how's?" and if someone interrupts in between with doubts or clarifications, it's difficult for the presenter to manage time on what he has to present. We can reduce the number of sessions and increase the time to around 90 minutes per session or the best option is to conduct a 2 or 3 day program which can serve as Oracle festival for Oracle lovers as this is a one time event per year (I know the difficulties behind the logistics required and the organising efforts and with limited number of participants to the events this option is not much feasible, but a thought of mine :))

Overall I had a very productive and enjoyable day thanks to the organisers of the event and behind the scene members for such a wonderful day. I wish I attend these sort of forum activities and events as and when possible and not only participate as an audience but as a speaker as well in future.

Happy Networking!!

RMAN issue on Oracle 12.1.0.2

Thought of writing this article but forgot for a while and now it is.. The following RMAN backup threw me a weird error as follows. The server here is the Windows server 2012 R2 standard.

C:\Users\selvakumar.nagulan>rman target /

Recovery Manager: Release 12.1.0.2.0 - Production on Mon Feb 15 08:24:51 2016

Copyright (c) 1982, 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates.  All rights reserved.

connected to target database: XXXX (DBID=4292448189, not open)

RMAN> backup as compressed backupset database format 'D:\selvakumar.nagulan\Backup\port\bkp_b4_compinst.bak';

Starting backup at 15-FEB-16
using target database control file instead of recovery catalog
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: SID=130 device type=DISK
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting compressed full datafile backup set
channel ORA_DISK_1: specifying datafile(s) in backup set
input datafile file number=00001 name=D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\ORADATA\PORT\SYSTEM_01.DBF
input datafile file number=00002 name=D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\ORADATA\PORT\SYSAUX_01.DBF
input datafile file number=00003 name=D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\ORADATA\PORT\UNDOTBS_01.DBF
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting piece 1 at 15-FEB-16
channel ORA_DISK_1: finished piece 1 at 15-FEB-16
piece handle=D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\BACKUP\PORT\BKP_B4_COMPINST.BAK tag=TAG20160215T082546 comment=NONE
channel ORA_DISK_1: backup set complete, elapsed time: 00:00:25
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting compressed full datafile backup set
channel ORA_DISK_1: specifying datafile(s) in backup set
including current control file in backup set
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting piece 1 at 15-FEB-16
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03009: failure of backup command on ORA_DISK_1 channel at 02/15/2016 08:26:14
ORA-19504: failed to create file "D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\BACKUP\PORT\BKP_B4_COMPINST.BAK"
ORA-27038: created file already exists
OSD-04010: <create> option specified, file already exists

RMAN> show all;

RMAN configuration parameters for database with db_unique_name PORT are:
CONFIGURE RETENTION POLICY TO REDUNDANCY 1; # default
CONFIGURE BACKUP OPTIMIZATION OFF; # default
CONFIGURE DEFAULT DEVICE TYPE TO DISK; # default
CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP OFF; # default
CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP FORMAT FOR DEVICE TYPE DISK TO '%F'; # default
CONFIGURE DEVICE TYPE DISK PARALLELISM 1 BACKUP TYPE TO BACKUPSET; # default
CONFIGURE DATAFILE BACKUP COPIES FOR DEVICE TYPE DISK TO 1; # default
CONFIGURE ARCHIVELOG BACKUP COPIES FOR DEVICE TYPE DISK TO 1; # default
CONFIGURE MAXSETSIZE TO UNLIMITED; # default
CONFIGURE ENCRYPTION FOR DATABASE OFF; # default
CONFIGURE ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM 'AES128'; # default
CONFIGURE COMPRESSION ALGORITHM 'BASIC' AS OF RELEASE 'DEFAULT' OPTIMIZE FOR LOAD TRUE ; # default
CONFIGURE RMAN OUTPUT TO KEEP FOR 7 DAYS; # default
CONFIGURE ARCHIVELOG DELETION POLICY TO NONE; # default
CONFIGURE SNAPSHOT CONTROLFILE NAME TO 'D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\PRODUCT\12.1.0\DATABASE\SNCFPORT.ORA'; # default

I said the issue as weird because as you can see I have not used "including current controlfile" in the backup statement or I have not changed the default setting for non-CDB database RMAN configuration for controlfile autobackup.
RMAN is trying to backup the controlfile with the same name specified in the format clause.

To resolve the issue for then, I tried configuring the autobackup to ON as below.

RMAN> CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP ON;

new RMAN configuration parameters:
CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP ON;
new RMAN configuration parameters are successfully stored

RMAN> backup as compressed backupset database format 'D:\selvakumar.nagulan\Back
up\port\bkp_before_compinst.bak';

Starting backup at 15-FEB-16
using channel ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting compressed full datafile backup set
channel ORA_DISK_1: specifying datafile(s) in backup set
input datafile file number=00001 name=D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\ORADATA\PORT\SYSTEM_
01.DBF
input datafile file number=00002 name=D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\ORADATA\PORT\SYSAUX_
01.DBF
input datafile file number=00003 name=D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\ORADATA\PORT\UNDOTBS
_01.DBF
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting piece 1 at 15-FEB-16
channel ORA_DISK_1: finished piece 1 at 15-FEB-16
piece handle=D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\BACKUP\PORT\BKP_BEFORE_COMPINST.BAK tag=TAG20
160215T085218 comment=NONE
channel ORA_DISK_1: backup set complete, elapsed time: 00:00:26
Finished backup at 15-FEB-16

Starting Control File Autobackup at 15-FEB-16
piece handle=D:\SELVAKUMAR.NAGULAN\PRODUCT\12.1.0\DATABASE\C-4292448189-20160215
-00 comment=NONE
Finished Control File Autobackup at 15-FEB-16

RMAN>

Ha... The setting resolved the issue but I'm confused. Why does my backup command reported error in the first case? Am I missing something or should I report a bug to Oracle??

Waiting for your inputs...

Happy confusion.. :)

Update 06-Apr-2016
Solution:
I had this discussed in the LinkedIn "Oracle Senior DBA Group" group and found it is my mistake that I didn't realize that the control file will always be backed up automatically when datafile 1 is backed up even with the RMAN default setting of autobackup OFF.
I would have avoided this situation with a simple solution in my command as below.
Specify %U to the format clause in the backup command so that the controlfile would have created along with the database backup.

backup as compressed backupset database format 'D:\selvakumar.nagulan\Back
up\port\bkp_before_compinst_%U.bak';

Happy Solution! :)