Pythian Group

In this post:

• Introduction
• Question and background
• My opinion

Introduction

Tom Kyte, Cary Millsap, Steven Feuerstein hold a Database Guru Panel at #Kscope 11′s conference organized by ODTUG. I had a great opportunity to not just watch the Live Stream (you can see th recorded version  HERE) but also ASK questions ;). Big kudos to organizers for the fantastic opportunity to ask questions via Twitter and Face Book live. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work . Surprisingly enough several of my questions had been asked and answered live. One of the questions was related to UNDO/REDO statistics. I think that it was a bit of challenge  to define the question precisely having just 140 Twitter characters and therefore I decided to share my question here, give a bit of background and ask you “What is your opinion?”

Question and background

The following is the question I asked in the twitter (16 min 14sec in the recording ).

Tweet: #kscope Q to Guru Panel: What is the best way to find TOP SQLs generating the most UNDO/REDO in 11GR2?

Tom Kyte response: My first response to that would be “Why?”

Well … This questions is coming from my day to day Oracle DBA duties. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hello, and welcome to Log Buffer, a weekly blog about happenings in the database industry. Today is a celebration of the 200th edition of Log Buffer, and we’d like to give a special shout out to all of our guests hosts over the past 4 plus years. Their contributions have been invaluable in helping to grow Log Buffer into the community source of favorite database-related blog posts that it is today.

We’ve come a long way since our inaugural issue, Log Buffer #1, published July 14, 2006. This week enjoy mix of contributed links and the latest posts from past contributors.

Mart Rittman (Log Buffer #11) reminds everyone that OBIEE 11gR1 is available for download. His colleague, Venkatakrishnan J follows up with posts on a few new and important features including reporting on CLOBs – Lookups, map views – integration with Mapviewer, handling double columns – ID/description interoperability, lookup tables – sparse and dense lookups and vertical clustering.

Adam Machanic, of SQLblog.com and host of Log Buffer #21 is reflecting on 6 plus years of blogging in the database world, and wants to know who his readers are.

Lewis Cunningham (Log Buffer #32) notes that the call for abstracts is open for ODTUG/Kaleidoscope 2011. Submission deadline is October 26, 2010. He also talks about a problem with success and offers good advice to make sure you’re not getting “crusty”.

Coskan Gundgobar (Log Buffer #49) responds to a slow system waiting on library cache lock and credits Tanel Poder’s scripts as the solution.

Jeremy Schneider (Log Buffer #55) points out that DBCA is missing from the 11gR2 ASM/grid installation.

Hubert Depesz Lubaczewski (Log Buffer #57) writes about OMNIPITR – hot-backups on slave – they really work.

Edie Awad (Log Buffer #73) references 5 interesting posts in his Monday, August 16th roundup including working with long columns, and database performance for developers.

Robert Treat (Log Buffer #127) shares on his personal opinion on what people should do following the announcement that OpenSolaris is cancelled and is to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express.

Gary Myers (Log Buffer #181) has a little fun with passwords on Sydney Oracle Lab.

Kent Milligan suggests to process your DB2 for i indexes in parallel and thus improve the overall performance of your database server.

Steve Karam, the Oracle Alchemist reports strange behaviour with MEMORY_TARGET.

Chris Presley shares Paul White’s post on viewing another session’s temporary table.

While a few have fallen off the map, it’s nice to see many members of our database blogging community still going strong.

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. My impression, which was confirmed by folks in the Oracle world, is that she knows her way around the Oracle optimizer.

See part 1 for the introduction and talking about power and hardware. This part will go over the 2nd “P”, partitioning. Learning about Oracle’s partitioning has gotten me more interested in how MySQL’s partitioning works, and I do hope that MySQL partitioning will develop to the level that Oracle partitioning does, because Oracle’s partitioning looks very nice (then again, that’s why it costs so much I guess).
Read the rest of this entry . . .

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. My impression, which was confirmed by folks in the Oracle world, is that she knows her way around the Oracle optimizer.

These are my notes from the session, which include comparisons of how Oracle works (which Maria gave) and how MySQL works (which I researched to figure out the difference, which is why this blog post took a month after the conference to write). Note that I am not an expert on data warehousing in either Oracle or MySQL, so these are more concepts to think about than hard-and-fast advice. In some places, I still have questions, and I am happy to have folks comment and contribute what they know.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. In that session, there was a section on how to determine I/O throughput for a system, because in data warehousing I/O per second (iops) is less important than I/O throughput (how much actual data goes through, not just how many reads/writes).

The section contained an Oracle-specific in-database tool, and a standalone tool that can be used on many operating systems, regardless of whether or not a database exists:
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of DBA industry happenings.

Read on for the latest updates in Log Buffer #193. Don’t forget, we’re always looking for volunteer editors to publish and host an issue of Log Buffer. If you’d like this to be you, contact the Log Buffer coordinator.

ODTUG/Kaleidoscope 2010 roundup:

Sheeri Cabral has posted slides and a summary of the first ever MySQL track at ODTUG/Kaleidoscope, citing a successful event.

Tim Hall, on Oracle-Base blog gives a daily report on the event summarizing his take on day 1 & 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Ronald Bradford and I produced a successful MySQL track at Kaleidoscope (hereinafter referred to as Kscope). With a speaker list of Philip Antoniades, Josh Sled and Craig Sylvester of Oracle, Laine Campbell of PalominoDB, Patrick Galbraith of Northscale, Sarah Novotny of Blue Gecko, Padrig O’Sullivan of Akiba, Dossy Shiobara of Panoptic.com and Matt Yonkovic of Percona, we knew the technical content was going to be great.

As someone who’s helped organize all the OpenSQLCamps, a few MySQL Camps, and the Boston MySQL User Group, I know that participation at an event such as this can be small. Despite planning the MySQL track at the last minute, we had top-notch speakers with appropriate content for the audience, which was mostly Oracle crossovers. We had several registrants who came solely for the MySQL content, with all but 2 of the 27 sessions having 10-25 audience members. According to a few different folks, this is the same amount as the SOA and BPM track receives, and that track was not planned at the last minute. The ODTUG conference committee and board were happy with the turnout as well. I can’t wait to see the results of the evaluations!

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Updated: 29-Jun-2010, 30-Jun-2010.

For me, ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 started on Friday with the ACE Directors briefing. Best practices topic was touched there slightly and I twitted about it. I decided that the feedback deserves a blog post so I’m simply quoting the conversation here. If you have anything to add, you know where to find the comment box.

alexgorbachev:
best practices should be forbidden or rather renamed to blue-prints #ACED

Fri Jun 25 16:26:26 +0000 2010

GregRahn: @alexgorbachev IMHO “Best Practices” are often sought after as an alternative to thinking and understanding. Two key components there!

Fri Jun 25 16:33:07 +0000 2010

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Today at Kaleidoscope I will be doing a 90-minute session comparing MySQL’s SQL syntax to the ANSI/ISO SQL:2003 standard, entitled What Do You Mean, “SQL Syntax Error”?

You can download the PDF slides now.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

It is time… Time for one more very special conference for me. Why special?

1. I have never been to ODTUG Kaleidoscope before. I always like new conferences — new experience.
2. Unlike Sheeri, I do not speak! This is one of those rare conferences where I come to slack off, meet old friends and make new ones, go to lots of sessions and actually learn stuff.
3. Coming from the DBA background, it’s not often that I come to development oriented conferences and I think I should do more of that.
4. It’s in Washington, DC. I lived there for some time and have number of good friends there. I’m really excited to see them again!

So what am I going to do there? I just arrived and right in time for the Oracle ACE Directors’ briefing that will run for the whole days of Friday. This is a super secret meeting where Oracle’s super secret plans are shared. Nobody can talk about that after this meeting or their tongues are cut off on the spot. For those of you who didn’t realize I’m joking, the ACE Director’s briefing is where Oracle shares the roadmap of its products — some of it is long term strategy and some is about the upcoming releases. There are few things that we are asked not to share in public but, frankly, there is nothing really sensitive. One of the most interesting parts of the briefing are the Q&A moments when all kind of questions get asked (sometimes tough ones) and, to the most parts, gets answered.
Read the rest of this entry . . .