Pythian Group

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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I had a great time today at RMOUG. Still very tired from traveling yesterday, I missed the opening session. I managed to make it to Bradley Brown’s APEX session, only a little late. I was quite impressed with some of the things that can be done in APEX. Brad demonstrated a sample application with master detail records in different regions of the screens with colour and with context changing automatically based on which records were selected. I like the way that Brad used SQL statements and returned different data based on values set in the page data.

Daniel Liu did a good job of presenting 11g New Features for DBAs. It will be interesting to see how partitioning on virtual columns work. The new 11g data compression also sounds very interesting. It now works on a block level, rather than table level and dynamically re-compresses data as necessary. I wonder what new wait events are related to this new workload ?

I attended the “Building Dynamic Google Gadgets in Java” session. I was a little concerned that it would be heavy into Java and I might get lost. I was pleasantly surprised at how little Java there was and how simple the gadgets were to use and develop. Hopefully I will get a chance to play with this when I get back.

For the rest of the afternoon, I attended Graham Wood’s presentation on “The DB Time Performance Method”, followed by Michael Rosenblum’s presentation on “Autonomous Transactions”. I had used them a lot in a previous life for error logging and processing child records did not think I was going to get too much out of the presentations. I was very pleasantly surprised and thoroughly enjoyed some of the tricks used and interesting ways that Michael was using autonomous transactions.

I ended the day of presentations with Mogens Norgaard’s Tuning session. OK…perhaps it is not fair to say it was Mogens’s presentation as he did rely heavily on audience participation, especially from Daniel Fink, Jonathan Lewis and Graham Wood. I am not sure he even let them know that he would be calling on them to co-present. But he did bribe them handsomely with some very rare Danish Beer.

It’s been a while singe I blogged last time. Not that I’m feeling guilty — it’s coming whenever I have the mood and time left — but I kind of missed it. I have enough to share for few blogs a day and let’s hope I make it more often. But I digress.

I’m in Denver now and it’s RMOUG Training Days time! The University Sessions were running yesterday and the conference itself starts today. I have heard a lot of good things about RMOUG and the conference is considered as one of the best Oracle events in North America. I will be able to confirm it during the next two days but I have no doubt that it’s true.
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