I’m at Collaborate 08 in Denver these days. I arrived yesterday evening so I haven’t had a chance to see any sessions yet but I did have a nice dinner with a bunch of OakTable folks. The steak wasn’t great but the best part was that I could enjoy my time with people I don’t get to see very often.

Today started with some confusion. My presentation, Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box, was originally scheduled on Thursday at 9:45 AM but due to participation in the speaker panel ,”To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA?”, it was rescheduled to today, Wednesday, at 4:30 PM. However, this change didn’t make it to the printouts with latest changes so the options right now are either re-schedule my session to a later time tomorrow or keep it at the original schedule and pull me off the panel. I’d really enjoy that panel as it goes right along my alley but I need to make my session as well so we’ll see how it works out.

I’m off to the Carol Dacko’s presentation about DBMS_XPLAN now and looking forward to show up at the RAC SIG Birds of a Feather later today. Stay tuned - more to come…

There’s no video for Jacob Nikom’s December 2007 Boston MySQL User Group meeting, but the slides for “Measuring MySQL Server Performance” can be downloaded (2.33 MB) at http://technocation.org/files/doc/Measuring_MySQL_server_performance_03.ppt

And with that, this is (I believe) post #10,000 at Planet MySQL!

Today is Hotsos Symposium 2008 Training Day — one full day with Tom Kyte. I haven’t registered for it so I took the chance to sleep until 10 this morning which was excellent idea considering that last night we were quite late going to bed thanks in parts to the joined demo that James Morle and Mike Erwin organized at the last presentation yesterday. I was in the James’ session and he was demonstrating how to hide latency problem with batching. I suspect that Mike, in the next hall, was showing the impact of MTU settings on cluster interconnect. The end result is that beer bottles travelled between the presentation halls and James ended up with about 3 packs of Guinness and Shiner Bock. That what kept us up longer last night.

James’ presentation itself was excellent — he explained that all performance problems can be caused by either skew or latency. You can’t normally fix skew issue so you just need to be aware and account for it. Latency can sometimes be shortened but usually insignificantly or it’s impractical (i. e. very expensive). It’s also very important to distinguish bandwidth and latency. I like his idea that the efficient way to solve latency is hiding it and there are generally two ways to do that — batching and threading. Improving bandwidth often doesn’t cause any performance improvement without taking latency into account. Very insightful talk. Thanks James.
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The symposia is still ongoing and my head is slowly filling up — relieved from my presentation, finally, I’m able to focus on others’ sessions.

Yesterday, Tanel Poder presented his new tool Sesspack and his integration with Excel. 3 years ago, I created a similar tool and collected session waits and statistics transformed into differences per the interval and organized in the star schema to simplify the analysis. I tried to write a front-end in PHP — it was taking ages and I didn’t have time. Then I tried APEX (HTMLDB 1.6 back then) and it wasn’t flexible enough. I ended up querying the data directly and copy & paste to Excel where I could use pivot charting. What a great feature of Excel — it let me organize the data easily and visualize the problems to management, system and storage administrator and other DBA’s. I moved on and didn’t have time to continue this project, clean it up and put into public domain. I’ve still had it in my mind but there is no need now since Tanel already did far better job. He put the first version of the Sesspack on his web-site about half a year ago. What excited me more this time was the integration with Excel that he did — what a powerful but simple tool in the hands of a smart DBA. I’m looking forward to use it when it becomes available on his web-site.
Update: Tanel put the material on his web-site here.
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First of all “the before” time is over — I’m done with my presentation. It’s been the first slot of the day — 8:30 and Cary Milsap was presenting in another hall so what chances do I have to get people in? It turned out that some people actually did show up and quite a few considering the circumstances.

I have mixed feeling on the results. The presentation started very well and I managed to wake people up at the very beginning — thanks to the “equipment” I had at hands (thanks Marco and Riyaj!). You can spot one of them on the photo (thanks for the photo Marco):

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Courtesy of our friends at Oracle cost containment company Miro Consulting, I am giving a webinar tomorrow at 1pm EST (click this link for the time in other timezones please.

The subject I’ve chosen is how to apply the best practices around advanced supply management that are extremely successful and mature in the product supply chain world to the equally extremely immature practices we typically find in enterprise IT supply provisioning.

It should be a great presentation; I give an overview of the famous “Toyota Way” and cover some recent findings from the California Management Review as well.

The first point of the webinar is gaining an understanding of what the “supply management promise” really is - in broad terms it means achieving double-digit annual compound cost savings on the resource being supplied. The second point of the webinar is to discuss the methods for achieving this recurring savings and how to apply them to IT services.

This isn’t easy and requires substantial discipline, leadership and often even attitudinal change and leadership from the purchaser, and of course a vendor that is committed to passing on those savings to their customer, something that is culturally de rigueur in the product/manufacturing space, but highly unusually in the IT infrastructure management space (since claiming those savings are typically the vendor’s profit model). Of course, the Pythian approach is highly compatible with the application of advanced supply management strategies, whereas most outsourcing companies in the IT infrastructure and architecture space are very much not. Interestingly enough, the fully-insourced approach to enterprise data and systems management is also incapable of delivering the savings (because of the substantial cost in morale and team cohesion of claiming any should they materialize).

The target audience for this presentation is executives responsible for the IT infrastructure spend, often CFOs, COOs and CTOs who have an oversight role not only for the database licensing cost, but also for the operational cost of IT infrastructure ownership. A technical audience will learn about how Pythian works and how we position our offering to the executive suite purchaser.

I’ll do my best to get the audio and slides up on our website in the coming days.

As I mentioned, the presentation is being hosted and sponsored by Miro, a great partner of Pythian’s, and I blogged about Miro once before, here. You can register for the presentation by following this link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/204538076. Although the presentation is sponsored by Miro and they focus on Oracle, the presentation is not at all Oracle-specific and the techniques I discuss within it are highly appropriate for customers of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL.

The time is flying here and two days of RMOUG Training Days 2008 have gone. In a nutshell, what a great conference! Well done RMOUG and special thanks to Peggy King!

It was very nice to see a bunch of old friend and meet new ones in person including Jeremiah Wilton and Tim Gorman.

I liked the lunch organization — everyone was seated and nice food served — way better than standing buffet. The area with the tables was also used for the breakfast and this is where the keynote was done — excellent idea to combine those together:

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It’s been a while singe I blogged last time. Not that I’m feeling guilty — it’s coming whenever I have the mood and time left — but I kind of missed it. I have enough to share for few blogs a day and let’s hope I make it more often. But I digress.

I’m in Denver now and it’s RMOUG Training Days time! The University Sessions were running yesterday and the conference itself starts today. I have heard a lot of good things about RMOUG and the conference is considered as one of the best Oracle events in North America. I will be able to confirm it during the next two days but I have no doubt that it’s true.
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Mind you this was actually written more than a week ago but I didn’t have time to review and upload the photos on time so sorry for this delay.

I’m on the plane back to Canada and I’m extremely satisfied with the conference this year. I should say that I found it harder to keep up in the evenings with some slightly non-sober DBA’s around and get up “early” in the mornings to visit several good morning technical sessions. You might blame age but I shouldn’t complain… not yet, at least!

Enough whining… This is my final UKOUG 2007 post as you might have figured already so let’s get to it.

The last day was the shortest but the most difficult. I set my alarm at 8AM and it worked, unfortunately. I got up but couldn’t find my way around bouncing from the walls and bumping into the corners so I had to catch another couple hours of sleep. I could only wake up after 10 and by the time I took a shower, packed my luggage and checked out, it’s almost the middle of Doug Burns’ presentation and I didn’t want to disturb his speech which was very good I heard. Christo’s presentation was over by that time but I saw it already anyway in a full 60 minutes format so I didn’t really need a 45 minutes refresher. In addition, I can always shout in the office if I need an answer to a memory questions.

I waited in the speaker lounge until Doug’s session is over and used this opportunity to chat with few other speakers and later bumped into Lisa Dobson (or did she bump into me?). I had an interesting observation that we both were whispering and my explanation would be that we didn’t want to bother several other speakers who were focused on work, presentations and emails. There is another theory as well but I like this one more. ;-)
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Yesterday morning, I let myself to sleep longer — I had to be rested before my presentation as the previous evening went quite late. I also had to review my slides and, finally, complete them with couple finishing touches. That means I couldn’t make couple morning sessions. I decided to go to a presentation about Enterprise Manager. Not that I was aiming to learn something new about the product but I was interested to compare my experience with others and the sessions served the purpose quite well.

My own presentation went probably well as far as I could judge following up with people later in the day. The session was in Hall 5, which is a relatively large room — it fits 300+ people. However, the problem in the room was that the light on the speaker (me) was very bright and the light on the audience was dimmed so I couldn’t really see the faces! That meant I couldn’t see the nods, whether the audience is following me as well as their reaction so I couldn’t be sure that my jokes worked (I think I heard few snickers) and this made me even more worrying. According to the information from a reliable source, I looked more worried than usual. I’m afraid this time I couldn’t hide it well enough - I’m always tense at my presentation.

Just before my session I bumped into Jonathan Lewis during lunch time and he asked me if it’s true that I fell asleep in the middle of his session. To give you some background, (more…)