Pythian Group

Tom Kyte speaks for about an hour on the newest features in Oracle 11g, including how many new features and enhancements there are. The presentation itself can be downloaded from Tom’s site and the video can be directly played in your browser on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25oUes-pMwI or in the embedded video below:

To start off the conference, the first keynote at Oracle OpenWorld took a break from technology and veered into the world of politics. The official conference description says:

Washington’s best-loved political couple Mary Matalin and James Carville entertain the crowd with a bitingly humorous look at the world of politics.

Indeed, there was humor, and politics. For a light-hearted yet factual look at US politics, watch the video by streaming directly in your browser or download the 176 Mb Flash video file.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Almost everyone and their mum has been twittering about (or from) Mozilla Labs’ newest creation, Ubiquity. You can get a quick introduction of this firefox extension via their blog post, which has a video tour.

Well, after playing around with the simple stock commands (email, wikipedia search, twittering), I decided it was time for a handy Oracle search function. I emerged from my cave with a pretty basic Ubiquity command that will search the tahiti documentation, and optionally search the documentation for a specific version of Oracle from 9iR2 onward. Right now it will simply take you to the Oracle search results page. If I find that Oracle is providing an API to the tahiti search engine, I may enhance it to include results in the Ubiquity preview pane.
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Well, nobody from Sun showed up in person, but we got a great rendition of “Where were you when you heard THE NEWS that Sun bought MySQL?” from Mark Rubin, the MySQL Sales Engineer for the New England area, and from Giuseppe Maxia, who revealed something very interesting and riveting.

From there, Giuseppe gave a short talk on what it’s like to work at MySQL, and then we moved on to the topic of the user group meeting, “What is MySQL Cluster Good For?”

The slides for the talk are downloadable in PDF Format 61kB and Flash (SWF) format, 31kB

The video can be played at http://technocation.org/node/572/play and downloaded (404 Mb) at http://technocation.org/node/572/download.

Here is the video of “Database Basics”, which I presented at the February 2008 Boston MySQL User Group meeting. The presentation goes over the basics of relations, data, the Entity-Relationship Model, how to choose data types, and how to do basic CREATE statements.

You can download:

the video (Large, 500 MB, or Small, 100 MB)
and
the slides (PDF, 171 Kb).

Or just watch the video:

Welcome the the 85^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Here we go!

Oracle

We start with the obscure. Eddie Awad has started the Obfuscated SQL Code Contest on his Oracle Community site, thanks to an idea by Chen Shapira. If you’re familiar with this contest’s antecedents, like the obfuscated C or Perl contests, you’ll know how entertaining it is to see people turn their creativity to code that should never exist in the real world. Like Rob van Wijk’s interrogative submission, for example.

Chen herself (just a simple DBA on a complex production system) posts about the right way to handle Oracle on NFS and TCP throttling, reaching into relatively dark corners of Linux, like net.core.rmem and net.core.wmem.

Even the ordinary business of DBA can seem obscure. “Are any of you that run RAC in your production environments backing up your archive logs to an FRA that resides in an ASM disk group (and of course backing up the archive logs to tape from the FRA)?” That’s what Eric S. Emrick asks in his post, RMAN, RAC, ASM, FRA and Archive Logs, FYI.

On Halis way, Hampus Linden shows how to delete an object with a special character in Oracle. He writes, “There are some things in Oracle that are possible but shouldn’t be possible. One thing I love to hate is the fact that you can create tables with almost any name, just as long as you double quote it. . . . Horrible! And what’s even more horrible is that people actually do this.” Hampus attacks the horror with some PL/SQL.

On the Oracle Scratchpad, Jonathan Lewis links to a well regarded article on using Statspack, writing, “It’s been a few years since I last read this article from Connie Dialeris Green of Oracle about how to use Statspack – and I’d forgotten how good it was. . . . If you want to get the best out of Statspack . . . you need to create and validate a sensible hypothesis based on all the information available. This paper instructs you in the method.”

Jonathan also has an item on pushing predicates. “Some time ago I wrote a note . . . about the push_pred() and no_push_pred() hints. I’ve recently discovered a bug in the 9.2 optimizer that means you may find that Oracle will not use ‘join predicate pushing’ when it is obviously a good idea.”

Tim Hall has an article about 11g bits and bobs, “ . . . covering the Miscellaneous New Features section of the OCP upgrade exam.”

From Igor’s Oracle Lab comes an ecumenical piece by Gary Myers, who asserts that, while databases differ, problem-solving approaches don’t. He writes, “This entry is more SQL Server than Oracle, but it is generic in some ways, and its also got the closest I’ve found to v$sql in SQL Server 2005.”

SQL Server

In the SQL Server world, SSQA.net’s blog brings the news that the cumulative update package 6 for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 is now available.

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I gave this talk at the UKOUG, and I have received a few requests to post the slides online. Instead of just posting the PowerPoint I took some time to give the presentation again (internally here at Pythian) and this time we recorded the session and we are posting it here in a variety of formats. This is a bit of a departure from the typical Pythian Goodies, in that it is scripted, and there is a lot of content here in the whitepaper, but there hasn’t been a Goodie in a while so why not!

I’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to ask any follow-up questions to this post in the comments.

Abstract

Do I have enough memory? Why is my free memory so low? Am I swapping to disk? Can I increase my SGA (db cache) size? Can I add another instance to this server? Are my system resources used optimally? These are all questions that often haunt DBAs. This presentation is The Answer. It covers in detail the different types of memory, how to monitor memory, and how to optimally use it with Oracle. Multiple examples in the presentation demonstrate how certain actions on the database side cause different memory areas to be allocated and used on the OS side. Key underlying differences in operating systems approaches to managing memory will be highlighted, with special attention given to Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Using Linux as an example throughout, this presentation explains how to effectively use tools such as “top”, “vmstat” and “/proc/meminfo” to look into into a system’s allocation and use of memory.

Below you should see a flash video with me giving the session.

Download this presentation!
Powerpoint
IPod video (right-click and Save As . . .)
MP3 audio only

And below you will find the complete contents of the whitepaper. This is intended to be a good overall reference resource for how memory works in Oracle, using Linux as an example.

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As Doug Burns already mentioned, here’s another video from the Pythian Goodies project.

As usual, the Goodies are intended to be debates, so please post any questions or follow-ups with the relevant time-index from the video.

Featuring Doug himself, he discusses Parallel Basics. This video is a good introduction to using Oracle Parallel features and most importantly, what problems you may have with it. Topics discussed:

• Basic Parallel Execution (PX) architecture
• Degree of Parallelism and number of slaves
• Instance configuration for parallel operation
• Hints for Parallelism
• Common problems
• Dictionary queries for monitoring parallel operations

Online Videos by Veoh.com

P.S.: I love the moment that the thumbnail captured.

Two weeks ago, I released a video about Flash Recovery Area as part of the Pythian Goodies project. Here is the next video in the sequence.

Oracle I/O Basics

This video covers:

• Disk I/O Concepts
• Async disk I/O concepts – when does Oracle use it
• Monitoring via vmstat – explained
• Monitoring via iostat – explaining the meaning of the %util (disk busy time) column, queue depth, service time, wait time
• Concepts of larger queue, faster disk I/O, slower response time, more through-put.

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v237408rJb8XQWX

As usual, the Goodies are intended to be debates, so please post any questions of follow-ups with the relevant time-index from the video.

N.B.: YouTube decided to limit director’s accounts to 10 minutes and decided to have a new account type called the “10+ minutes” account. Unfortunately, the form to apply for such accounts is disabled until further notice. We had to find an alternative and we picked veoh. It comes in handy as it offers an iPod version for direct download.

On Friday, I announced the Pythian Goodies project, and now here it is, the very first video of the series. The topic is “Flash Recovery Area,” and how can it make your life easier. Of course, we discuss some caveats too.

Don’t forget, the Goodies are intended to be debates, so if you have any questions or follow ups, please post them with the relevant time index from the video.

Flash Recovery Area

Link to YouTube movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1UQCJOYzc8

Downloadable version of the video for iPod:

What is Pando?

P.S.: I know the whiteboard is not very visible. I’ve corrected the camera position in the next one.