Pythian Group

This is just a short blog post to spread the word about the upcoming webinar organized by Embarcadero with fellow member of OakTable Network — Jonathan Lewis and Kyle Hailey — Ultimate SQL Tune-off.

Kyle and Jonathan are on my list of the most respected Oracle performance experts and I could only imagine what they can deliver joining the forces. I’ll allow myself to quote the opening of the webinar as it sounds really interesting:

According to Jonathan Lewis, there is a basic strategy to writing efficient SQL, but it requires knowledge of the data, the metadata, and the intent of the query.

Jonathan will start with the basic principles of efficient data access and then show different ways of analyzing the data. He’ll then describe a graphical approach to finding the most efficient access path for a query and then apply the method to a problem he recently saw with one of his clients.

But wait… is there more than one way to skin a cat? Kyle Hailey thinks so, and he’s not afraid to let Jonathan know it!

Kyle’s fancy footwork will include his own approach to Visual SQL Tuning (VST) with some ring side support from DB Optimizer XE. Hitting below the belt? You be the judge.

The webinar is on June 10, 2010 at 11AM Pacific / 2PM Eastern.

Pythian DBA’s have daily reports for each monitored database and some of the components are using charts to visualize the data. I’m a big fan of charts myself (when applied appropriately) and want to show how you can generate simple charts directly from the database. You’d be very surprised how easy it can be done from *any* database without installing any additional software or configuring something special.

This method is not limited to Oracle by any means — use it with MySQL, SQL Server or any other database as well as without a database — yes, visualize your sar data now!

In this example, we will plot a pie diagram with Oracle tablespaces. This would be very handy when you are starting to analyze the space allocation for a database. Here is the end result of the report for my Grid Control repository test database:

Read the rest of this entry . . .