Pythian Group

This post is long overdue, as I was supposed to blog about my appearance at NoCOUG before I left (sorry, Vanessa!). However in my efforts to rehearse and adjust my presentation, blogging about it just fell to the wayside. However now that NoCOUG 2011 Summer Conference is in the books, I’d like to take a few minutes to share my experience not only as an attendee, but also as a first-time speaker.

When I found out that NoCOUG had accepted my abstract, “Oracle 11g: Learning to Love the ADR”, I was both ecstatic and terrified. This meant that I actually had to prepare the presentation and speak in front of peers. Surely they would throw me into San Francisco Bay if I didn’t bring my A-game, so I set out to do just that.
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It’s a busy summer at Pythian, with our continuing wave of speaking sessions at upcoming community and regional industry events.

Coming to a city near you, watch for Pythian presenting hot Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server database topics:
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A few days ago I learned about this year’s NoCOUG SQL Challenge and decided to to put the gray matter between my ears to work. I’ve been teaching a MySQL course this week and my first impulse was to use my MySQL VM to test my solution attempts. However, I eventually decided to use Recursive Subquery Factoring to solve the proposed problem and had to switch to an Oracle 11gR2, since it’s the only database that implements this feature that I know how to use (are there any others?).

I was happy with my solution, but frustrated that I couldn’t run it on MySQL. So I decided to try to make it somehow work on MySQL.
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Seems that our André Araujo has already spilled the beans and revealed his solution to the second edition of the NoCOUG SQL Challenge.

Now, I can’t let him have all the fun, can I?

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The announcement of the Second International NoCOUG SQL Challenge sponsored by Pythian and Apress has been published in the February 2011 issue of the NoCOUG Journal. See pages 18 and 19 for rules, details of the unsolvable riddle and prizes to be awarded to the smartest wizard who can reveal the secret message.

SQL commands for creating the required data are available here. Submissions should be sent to: SQLchallenge@nocoug.org.

Last year’s challenge was a success with nine solutions from participants in seven countries and three continents. The results of the previous challenge are available can be read here. We’re proud to say Andre Araujo, located in Pythian’s Australian office, was one of those nine.

This year, we expect more Pythians to challenge the community.

Good luck to all, and may the best Es-Cue-El practitioner win!

Welcome to Log Buffer, a weekly review of the database industry. This week’s issue, Log Buffer #211 is our last for 2010, and has been published by Iggy Fernandez, editor of the quarterly journal of the Northern California Oracle User Group (NoCOUG).

As always, if you’d like to host your own issue of Log Buffer, simply reach out to the Log Buffer coordinator. We already have quite the line-up of guest hosts for 2011, including Chet Justice, Iggy Fernandez, Sunil Ranka, and Asif Momen.

On behalf of the Log Buffer publishing team, and the Pythian family, we wish you all the very best of success in 2011, and thanks for reading!

I’ve never attended the North California Oracle User Group Conferences even though they are organized every quarter. However, I’ve been always jealous of the great agenda they put together. A couple months ago, Chen Shapira reminded me once again that the next NoCOUG conference was coming up and asked whether I would be able to come to present. What a chance, I thought, easy to plan as I have no other conferences in May.

So, at NoCOUG Spring Conference 2010 in just 10 days, I’ll be doing my two hour long presentation — Demystifying Oracle RAC Workload Management. If it’s your local conference, I hope you can attend and say hello. You might also want to download the whitepaper that I put together few years ago for Hotsos Symposium — Oracle RAC Workload Management.

The conference is free to members of NoCOUG and only $50 to non-members but it would make more sense to just join the user group as its annual fees are unbelievably low — I couldn’t say it better than Iggy Fernandez did:

How much does a NoCOUG membership cost? It doesn’t cost $400, as you might expect to pay for so much educational value. It doesn’t cost $300 and it doesn’t cost $200. It doesn’t even cost $100. Yes, a calendar-year NoCOUG membership only costs $95! Won’t you join today?

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I love puzzles. So when I heard about the NoCoug SQL Challenge I felt tempted to give it a go.

The Northern California Oracle Users Group (NoCoug) has challenged us to find a good way to calculate the probability of getting different sums for x throws of a n-sided die using only SQL. The probabilities for the faces of a single die are stored in a table and that’s all you need to start playing with the problem. The SQL Challenge rules can be found on the NoCoug website, along with some other relevant information.

After working out my very first solution, I read the rules and found it wasn’t fit for the challenge, as it used non-SQL extensions (SQL*Plus). So I started again, this time using pure SQL. I came up with a few options but wasn’t happy with them from a performance perspective. They needed more sweating.

I find that walking is very good for thinking. Whenever I can, and when weather permits, I walk home from work at the end of the day. The distance between work and home is about 6 km, which takes me around one hour to cover. After you’ve done it a few times the walking becomes automatic and  you don’t have to think about it anymore; obstacles, kerbs, corners, street-crossings are all handled in auto-pilot mode. Then, as you don’t have anything else to do, you think.

During the days I was working on the challenge solution, the SQL query used to occupy my thoughts along most of my (almost) daily walk. I decided to use only standard SQL features and wanted to be able to run the solution on both Oracle and SQL Server. While walking, I started thinking on ways to improve my initial solution’s performance without having to resort to non-standard tricks.

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