Pythian Group

The 2012 edition of RMOUG Training Days in Denver less than a month away, running February 15 and 16 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Although it’s only two days, there’s a lot of technical content there, and a refreshing reduction in marketing-oriented presentations from “product managers”. It’s not too late to register, and it’s a pretty nice excuse to get to the Rockies in ski season. I’ll be doing two presentations, and am polishing up whitepapers and presentations for the submission deadline tomorrow:

• Exadata I/O Resource Manager: Ideal Technology for Database Consolidation, Wednesday 1:15pm in room 4B
• Peering Through the Cloud: The Straight Goods on Oracle Exalogic, directly after, Wednesday 4pm in room 4C

They’re right after each other in the grid, but I do get a short break for the dedicated exhibit hall time and paid vendor presentations (yes there are still a few; they have to pay the bills somehow).
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I’m following up on a conference almost half a year later — try to bet that! Actually, this blog post was written more than 3 months ago and was sitting in my drafts waiting the moment I understand why I really wrote it. 3 months later… I still don’t know but I thought I should share it anyway. Maybe I could at least get some comments…

Pythian participates at dozens of database conferences every year. Usually, our participation comes down to sending speakers to present. Occasionally, we make a decision to join as exhibitors too. This is usually an exception (or so it’s been thus far) because our exhibition experience doesn’t always show any visible impact in the form of new revenue or generating real opportunities leading (with maybe couple small exceptions) to business. It means that when we think on whether we invest into an exhibition booth or in sending few more speakers to a conference, we are likely choosing the latter.

This year’s RMOUG Training Days was one of those exceptions — we thought that exhibition booth cost was very affordable and by getting a booth I could ensure that we have an OakTable Network booth too (which makes sense since we actually have few Oakies at Pythian). Traditionally, exhibitors setup raffle prizes. This is usually done to collect business cards in attempt to generate some marketing leads. While this is somewhat important (yeah — we do marketing too), I already mentioned that these leads haven’t really materialized into anything for us (well, maybe not yet) but we would still do it — get a simple prize and then add business cards to our database so that we can email a Pythian newsletter once in a blue moon or even reach out for sales if there is some indication that Pythian could help. I’d say nothing unusual.

It’s all good but the thought of doing just a boring raffle didn’t sit right with me. Read the rest of this entry . . .

RMOUG was over last week but I haven’t got back until earlier this week and I finally managed to clean up the backlog of things I missed so I could write the conference wrap up. After the RMOUG, I went skiing with a bunch of good friends and discovered a great skiing resort of Breckenridge. This is me at the peak 8 summit:

These were great times except one day with the questionable results of an experiment to find a recipe for the perfect hangover that I and Mogens Nørgaard have conducted. Well, the science does require sacrifices…

Back to the conference…
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Oracle ASM 11g Release 2 – The Evolution

Oracle Automatic Storage Management has proven to be one of the most widely adopted new features in Oracle Database 10g and it has been dramatically improved in the later 11g releases. This presentation will explain what changes are solved by ASM, how these challenges are solved, what barriers there are to ASM adoptions, and how 11g Release 2 addresses these barriers.

I shall say that the slides alone are not that helpful without my commentary but if you didn’t manage to attend it on one of the previous conferences, we will be releasing it as a webinar soon so stay tuned.

RMOUG Training Days 2010 are in the full swing today with the University classes ongoing and that’s also the day most of my friends arriving here at Hyatt and when all the fun begins. Now that my stomach is full and Debra is off to her hotel room and Lisa is sleeping, I can finally do a quick blog post.

The flight Ottawa-Denver was quite enjoyable as it’s one of the rare direct flights from Ottawa. RMOUG volunteers pick up their guest speakers personally, which is a very nice touch, and with all this my travel to Denver feels just like a short drive to work. And that’s important if you know what we are up for tonight…

Few Oracle ACEs divers are going to jump into the pool with sharks at Denver Aquarium and show them who’s the boss. I’ll pretend to be a diving ACE as well (sh-h-h-h… don’t tell anybody I’m not). Unfortunately, it does mean that we will be late to the RMOUG speakers reception but we have to sacrifice something.

I’m sure you are dying to know what happens to us and if anybody gets eaten. If so, join us tomorrow, Wednesday 17-Feb, at the Read the rest of this entry . . .

Update 9-Feb-10: Want to schedule a meeting with Pythian folks? See Pythian Events page.

I’m so much looking forward to the next conference in my schedule — RMOUG Training Days 2010. It would be only my second time I’m presenting at the RMOUG but it was enough to go there once to understand that it’s one of the top rated Oracle User Group conferences in the world. Some of the great speakers are presenting and registration fees are very low compare to other events of comparable quality. If your conference budget is low this year — that’s the conference you don’t want to miss!

Two of us from Pythian are going to speak at RMOUG Training Days 2010 that starts in just 4 week. I present the following session:

Alex Gorbachev: Oracle ASM 11g — The Evolution.
Oracle Automatic Storage Management has proven to be one of the most widely adopted new features in Oracle Database 10g and it has been dramatically improved in the later 11g releases. This presentation will explain what changes are solved by ASM, how these challenges are solved, what barriers there are to ASM adoptions, and how 11g Release 2 addresses these barriers.

My colleague, Christo Kutrovsky is presenting the following:
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Day 2 finished yesterday. It was quite a busy day, with some excellent sessions.

Battle of the Nodes: RAC Performance Myths — Riyaj Shamsudeen
A great presentation on popular RAC myths, with some great examples. Excellent visuals that made complex processes look simple. I really liked this one.

Getting the Most Out of AWR — Tim Gorman
A first-rate session attended by a lot of the conference. It went into detail on what scripts are available to extract AWR information without needing Grid Control or Database Control. For command-line lovers, it’s great.

The SAN is guilty… until proven otherwise — Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha
A very important session for all DBAs, showing the end-to-end components involved in database I/O. There are so many more components that can cause problems between the database and the physical spindles. Concepts, case studies, plenty of information.

Understanding Oracle Execution Plans: How SQL is Really Executed – Tanel Poder
One of those eye-opening sessions, starting with how to read SQL Execution Plans, and moving to showing stack traces and mapping function calls, to Execution Plan steps. A must-see for everyone tuning SQL.

And that is it. As exhausting conferences are, I always wish for them to have been longer.

Day One at RMOUG in Denver is now over.

There were quite a few interesting presentations. Unfortunately, the very first I went to was canceled due to car trouble. I also found that several sessions of similar interest to me overlapped, so I had to choose my spots.

Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting
This presentation was particularly good. Tanel goes into detail on how to quickly asses a situation without going through a number of “health checks” and still be nowhere near solving the problem. His approach is to look directly at what a “hanging” session is waiting on, and to systematically determine the cause of the problem, with no time wasted.

Putting your database on a Diet: Oracle’s Data compression
A short overview of table compression. I found that that even though the presenter obviously had some experience with compression, there were hardly any examples nor anything mentioned about how to determine proper re-ordering to improve compression.

All About Oracle’s In-Memory Undo
An unusual topic—something that works so well that no one really talks about it. The presentation, however, was very short, and provided little new information. There was only one demonstrated test case. Although it went into detail about the difference between in-memory and standard undo, the other-than-obvious effects were omitted.

During lunch I took a picture that shows the entire RMOUG crowd:

Tomorrow is Day 2, and I will be posting about it here.

I am back on the road, going to RMOUG Training Days to present The Answer to Free Memory, Swap, Oracle, and Everything.

I am quite excited, as the RMOUG schedule (PDF) looks quite promising, especially these presentations:

• Further RMAN Optimizations in 11g — Stephan Haisley
• Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting: No Magic is Needed — Tanel Poder
• Understanding Oracle Execution Plans: How SQL is Really Executed — Tanel Poder
• The SAN is Guilty until proven otherwise — Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha

Some of these overlap, so I guess I will have to make a difficult choice.

I hope to see you all in Denver.

The time is flying here and two days of RMOUG Training Days 2008 have gone. In a nutshell, what a great conference! Well done RMOUG and special thanks to Peggy King!

It was very nice to see a bunch of old friend and meet new ones in person including Jeremiah Wilton and Tim Gorman.

I liked the lunch organization — everyone was seated and nice food served — way better than standing buffet. The area with the tables was also used for the breakfast and this is where the keynote was done — excellent idea to combine those together:

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