Pythian Group

Video fragments of my session posted at the end — read on.

I arrived at Omni Mandalay Hotel on Sunday evening with Dan Norris. I was flying through Chicago and it turned out that Dan was on the same flight and only few rows behind me. Small world.

Preparations for the conference were very chaotic on my part and, of course, I didn’t have either of my presentations ready. I was very stressed and getting sick as well — it looked like a complete disaster waiting to happen. I’d like to say that I was feeling like Doug Burns as he often managed to get sick just before a conference. Of course, I worked on my slides for the last few days as well as on the flight and presentation was slowly getting there but boy was I tired!

I quickly said hello to the crowd in the bar on the way to my room and rushed away to do some more damage to my slides. And then I had a brilliant idea — I could still see one of my best mates and do something good about my presentation! I asked Doug if he was interested in the preview (he probably wasn’t interested but he couldn’t say it to me) especially that my session wasn’t on his original agenda. Of course, that would mean that he had to leave a bunch of other good friends and spend some time tete-a-tete. Knowing Doug, this is some of the hardest thing to ask from him but it shows how good of a friend he is! (Plus, everyone thinks that he is anti-social anyway. Shhhh!)
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Time is flying and it’s hard to believe that less than a month left until the start of the next Hotsos Symposium. If you are reading this blog, there is no chance that you don’t know what Hotsos Symposium is — it’s the most authoritative conference focused around Oracle performance.

As a special thanks to Pythian customers (you do know that Hotsos is a Pythian partner, don’t you?), there is a $100 discount so please get in touch with us to receive it.

What should you expect coming to the Hotsos Symposium 2010? It’s 3 days packed with sessions on all aspects of Oracle performance optimization whether it’s design, troubleshooting, development, methodologies and processes. Legendary Tom Kyte — who else can you expect for the keynote?!

If you take an optional training day with Tanel Poder then you are likely to learn at least as much about troubleshooting Oracle database performance as you do during the conference and probably even more. Every presentation by Tanel has been an eye opener for me. If you’ve seen his material, you’d know what I’m talking about. Now, imagine that it’s not a one-hour session but the whole day! It will fry your brains so this day is for the strongest! :)
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More than a month has passed since Sydney Oracle Meetup #2. We shot some video, but it took me a while to process it and publish a few interesting pieces, but I finally got it all.

Ric Van Dyke’s presentation on tuning SQL queries using 10046 trace is available on the SOM website in the Files section (you must be a member). However, there were no material from Tanel Poder’s session — it’s title started with “Zero Slides…” and Tanel demonstrated live some of his secrets of productivity in Oracle troubleshooting. Luckily, my colleague, Andrey Goryunov, managed to shoot some of it on the video and I’m publishing here a couple fragments on the visualization of Oracle performance troubleshooting.

Make sure you are watching them in HQ on YouTube to see more details and if you like these videos, make sure you rate them.

PerfSheet is a very handy solution based on Microsoft Excel scripting and let you automate extraction and charting of any data you can extract from an Oracle database (and generally speaking, any other database). The best thing is that Tanel has put great efforts in it and made it available to everyone for free. One demo is worth many words so here we go:
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Unlike my previous post, this time it’s relevant for everyone and not only those lucky ones in Sydney. ;-)

I have been presenting about RAC Connection Management on a number of conferences and I have done a white paper that is focused on RAC Workload Management. It was available to the conference attendees and now is publicly available so read on.
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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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Like Alex G., I’ve left Ottawa and its wonderful snowy landscape this morning for, let’s say, a sunnier place.

But that’s all we have in common! I know the guy told you he is feeling some stress about his presentation but honestly, I doubt it! He has been preparing it for so long, he knows the subject so well, and he is so smart — just like so many people at Pythian, which is why I like it here so much. And to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t like to be at the Hotsos Symposium this year and have to choose between Alex and Cary Millsap.

So Alex, while you’ll be off socializing (and probably drinking more beers than you should), I will be working very hard, as always, this time with a couple of Oracle product managers.

The good news is everything went perfectly in Ottawa, Chicago, and here in San Francisco. I did not lose anything, and everything has just been on-time. The not-so-good — my hotel in Belmont seems about 800 miles away from Oracle Headquarters in Redwood City. I snapped this photo as I flew by on the highway:

When I arrived there, I had a couple of emails in my inbox; I should be able to meet the people I want to (except for Chuck and Larry, who are obviously too busy).

What I’ll be doing in the next five days is kind of a secret. Unfortunately, that’s all I’m allowed to tell you, except maybe that I know many people who would love to be in my shoes this week.

Last year’s Hotsos Symposium was the first for me. These were exciting few days and I fully enjoyed the conference. I’m very pleased that this year I’m going to Dallas again but this time in the new role — I’m doing a presentation there.

I don’t need to tell you what Hotsos Symposium is about — if you are on this blog, you should know it already. 3 days of high quality presentations and endless networking opportunities where you can share your ideas or concerns and get your questions answered.

My presentation is the first one on Tuesday — 8:30! It’s my first time presenting at Hotsos and I feel somewhat more tense than usual (as if I take it easy every time). I’m not the only new presenter at Hotsos and I know that Robyn Sands is doing her first Hotsos presentation as well (come on Robyn, when can I put that link on your name? ;). Anyway, I guess my sessions would not be attended by a huge crowd — it’s early and Cary Milsap is speaking in the next hall so people must be really interested in my topic to come to mine.

The topic of my presentation is Workload Management in Oracle RAC. I’m quite happy with the end result but I might have a little bit too much material to cover in 1 hour. I expect to spend most of the time in the “demo mode” on my 10g and 11g RAC clusters running on virtual machines on my MacBook. Depending on how it goes, some demos could span a bit longer than I plan depending on position of the moon and stars on Tuesday. I have a contingency plan as I really have to get to the last demo — it’s the coolest part of the session, I think.

I’m still rehearsing the demo and polishing the white paper. Excluding demo placeholders and navigational slides, I have just a little over 20 slides so not much efforts there. Most of the stuff I demonstrate “live” but a lot of details are in the white paper + demo examples provided to follow.

In addition, to the presentation, I will take part in the “Hotsos Campground” sessions on Monday and Tuesday evenings. There will be four of them and each is focused on a particular topic. I’m going to participate in the Hotsos RAC Campground. No surprise. Eh?

My plane leaves at 9:30 tomorrow. I hope there won’t be much snow and I leave on time — today is the first day of the spring on the calendar but I still did my 2 hours shoveling exercise. I think I’m getting better on it and it takes me half of the time I used to spend 3 months ago. Interesting, how much more can I improve?

Anyway, I hope I won’t need to do it again this year. Olga and Alex Jr. are joining me in Dallas after Hotsos and we are going to spend almost 10 days traveling around and, hopefully, enjoying some bits of sun. Bye, bye snow!