Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Apr 18, 2008
I guess I have only one and a half posts about COLLABORATE 08 this year. It’s a bit unfortunate that I couldn’t make the whole conference, but only last day-and-a-half. In addition, I’ve been speaking at the two lasts slots of the conference so it’s been quite busy for me.
As I mentioned already, the scheduling for my presentation got a bit screwed-up due to the last minute call to participate in the speaker panel — “To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA”. Thanks to Dan Norris, my session was finally moved to 11:00, which is right after the panel. On the other hand, 11:00 slot is the last IOUG session of the conference. This fact, coupled with last minutes re-scheduling, brought the number of participants down. Even though there were about 30 people and the hall (Korbel 1C) was small enough not to seem empty.
Back to the RAC speaker panel, I enjoyed the discussion and especially the fact that speaker’s opinions on how wide RAC adoption should be were a little different. I took the liberty of starting the discussion with a quite provocative quote — “complexity is the enemy of availability”. Interesting that the other panel speakers seemed to disagree to it to some extent by countering it — use knowledge to fight complexity. Not that I don’t agree with it (on the contrary) but my point was rather, “why make it complex when you can keep it simple?” Some of the reasons for over-complicating systems can be found here.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Apr 16, 2008
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…
Posted by Paul Vallee on Apr 25, 2006
Just a quick note to wish good luck to Pythian DBAs Christo Kutrosky and Babette Turner-Underwood who are presenting at Collaborate ‘06 today and tomorrow.
These are two outstanding presenters with deep technical knowledge reinforced with day-to-day use of the technology and I would encourage anyone to attend. If you attended the presentation, by all means post any feedback here!
Here are their schedules if you would like to attend:
| 1. |
Title: |
Postgres for the Oracle DBA |
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Speaker: |
Turner-Underwood, Babette |
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Expertise: |
Intermediate |
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Focus Area: |
Architecture & Infrastructure |
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Date: |
Tuesday, Apr 25, 2006 |
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Time: |
1:45 PM – 2:45 PM |
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Venue/Room: |
Gaylord Opryland Resort – Canal C |
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Paper Num: |
216 |
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Abstract: |
Postgres is a popular database for supporting Web sites. But, how does it really compare to Oracle? In this session, we will look at why Postgres has become so popular and why some people are moving their databases to Postgres. After giving a general introduction to Postgres, we will compare the features, strengths and weaknesses of the two database systems. The attendee will leave with an appreciation of the similarities and the differences between Oracle and Postgres and how to manage a Postgres database. The presentation will conclude with a case study of moving a client off of Oracle and onto Postgres. The planning involved, difficulties encountered, tricks discovered and lessons learned will be presented. |
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| 2. |
Title: |
Oracle 10g Data Pump 101 |
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Speaker: |
Turner-Underwood, Babette |
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Expertise: |
Intermediate |
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Focus Area: |
Architecture & Infrastructure |
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Date: |
Wednesday, Apr 26, 2006 |
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Time: |
9:15 AM – 10:15 AM |
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Venue/Room: |
Gaylord Opryland Resort – Canal C |
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Paper Num: |
207 |
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Abstract: |
Little enhancements were made to the boring but useful utilities exp / imp and sql*loader. For years we lived with the basic utlties and wrote our own wrapper scripts to provide more robust features. All of that now changes with Oracle Data Pump. Oracle has finally provided us with a standard tool to do what we always needed. |
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| 3. |
Title: |
Working with Automatic PGA |
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Speaker: |
Kutrovsky, Christo |
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Expertise: |
All |
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Focus Area: |
DBA |
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Date: |
Wednesday, Apr 26, 2006 |
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Time: |
1:30 PM – 2:30 PM |
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Venue/Room: |
Gaylord Opryland Resort – Bayou A |
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Paper Num: |
432 |
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Abstract: |
This all levels presentation uncovers the secrets of Oracle PGA memory management. It shows how to maximize memory usage by tweaking undocumented Oracle parameters and explains how they will affect query response time. It covers, in detail, how different settings change the behaviors of sorts and some obscure hash joins behaviors.
The presentation demonstrates how changing the necessary parameters will allow a server with 32G of RAM to use more then 8G of PGA memory to satisfy a single serial SQL statement.
“Working with Automatic PGA” had a great success and received excellent audience feedback in the February 2005 session of the Ottawa Oracle User Group. It has been recognized as one of the most useful presentations on the topic by some of the famous Oracle names. |
