Tanel Poder has put together an Online Virtual Oracle Conference and he asked me to participate. I had to think about it for about 2 seconds before I said yes. The speakers are Tanel, Cary Millsap, Jonathan Lewis and myself. Wow! How did I sneak into that line up you might wonder. Apparently Tanel asked Tom Kyte first, but Tom had to decline. It’s not the first time I’ve played second fiddle to Tom – and hopefully won’t be the last. I feel like I’m in pretty tall cotton (as we say in Texas).

Here’s how Tanel pitched the idea to me:

My reasoning is that we start from higher level and then drill down:

1) Cary talking about how to approach things right (and eventually find the problem SQL or operations)
2) I’m drilling down inside a SQL with row-source profiling (and eventually find where is the problem)
3) Jonathan talks why it happens and what to do about it (how to help CBO by writing better SQL)
4) Kerry talks how to help CBO and fix SQL when you can’t actually change the SQL text to any better

The whole idea of running a seminar on-line without anyone traveling is a very interesting topic. The technology has progressed to the point where it is quite possible. The idea of a short conference with multiple pretty well known speakers is also pretty cool. It will be interesting to see what kind of participation we get.

The conference is scheduled to be 8 hours spread over two days, Nov. 18 and 19. Follow the link below to read more about the event including the schedule, cost, how to sign up and abstracts for the talks.

Virtual Oracle Conference

Hope to see you there!

P.S. – There is a pretty good discount if you sign up before Nov. 1.

The Hotsos Symposium is, in my humble opinion, the best Oracle conference in the world. The quality of the presenters and the participants is just outstanding. So what a surprise and an honor to be invited to do the Keynote Talk at the 2011 Hotsos Symposium. I told Gary that I’d have to think about it for a day or so. Of course I agreed to do it. My good friend Karen Morton is doing the optional training day this year. She knows her stuff and is a great communicator. So I’d highly recommend sticking around for the extra day. Anyway, here’s a link to the main Hotsos Symposium page:

I got an email a few days ago asking if I would provide the scripts from my Hotsos Symposium 2010 presentations. I didn’t even realize the presentations had been posted anywhere but I managed to find them on my company’s website. So anyway, I decided to go ahead and post a link to the PDF’s and the scripts here as well. So click on the pretty pictures to get the PDFs and the cleverly titled text links to get the accompanying zip files with the scripts.

Controlling Execution Plans Zip File

My Favorite Scripts 2010 Zip File

Oh and Bob Sneed as “Disco Duck” (Thanks Marco)

Looks like I’ll be doing a second presentation at the Hotsos Symposium this year (due to a cancellation by another presenter). The first presentation will be “Controlling Execution Plans (without Touching the Code)”. This talk will be focused on hint based mechanisms (Outlines, SQL Profiles, SQL Baselines). The second topic will be “My Favorite Scripts”. It will be an interactive session demonstrating SQL scripts that I use most often when diagnosing Oracle issues. Here’s a link to the abstracts for my talks (pay no attention to the picture of the person dressed up as a pirate).

I am really excited about this year’s line up of speakers and I highly recommend the event for anyone that is interested in making Oracle perform better. Here’s a link to the signup page. By the way, you can save $100 if you sign up before Feb. 12th. Hope to see you there.

The best Oracle conference in the universe.

Well this will make 5 years in row that I’ve attended the Hotsos Symposium (this will be my third time as a speaker). As I’ve said before, it’s been far and away the best conference or training event that I’ve ever participated in. Add to that the extremely high quality of the people in attendance and you get an awesome event. There are always a fair number of people in the audience that could be delivering the presentations. One of the best things about it is the impromptu conversations that invariably pop up after (or sometimes during) a presentation.

The 2010 Symposium will be held in Dallas (as usual), March 7-11. Tom Kyte will be giving the key note address. Tom is well known, and rightly so, as he is always thought provoking and entertaining. Tanel Põder will be delivering the optional training day. If you haven’t heard of him yet you should do yourself a favor and check out his blog. There are only a handful of guys in the world that understand Oracle internals as well as Tanel.

I must say I am extremely honored to be able to present again at this years symposium. Here’s a link to the speakers page for this years event which has links to the abstracts for their presentations.  And here’s a link to the main Symposium page where you can find info on how to sign up.

Here’s the list of speakers (in case it’s too much trouble to click the link above):

Alex Gorbachev – Battle Against Any Guess & Run-Time Load Balancing in Oracle RAC
Alex Haralampiev – When a Good Design Goes Bad
Andrew Zitelli – Oracle 11g “Partitioning by Reference” – The Advantages and Annoyances
Bryn Llewellyn – Edition-Based Redefinition: the Key to Online Application Upgrade
Cary Millsap – Lessons Learned – Version 2010.03
Christian Antognini – Diagnosing Parallel Executions Performance
Dan Norris – Consolidation Strategies for Oracle Database Machine
Dave Abercrombie – End-to-End Metrics for Troubleshooting and Monitoring
Doug Burns – Odyssey Two: Parallel Query in 2010
Henry Poras – Diminishing Resource Utilization and Saturation Limits Using AWR History and Queueing Theory
Kerry Osborne – Controlling Execution Plans (without Touching the Code)
Kevin Closson – TBA
Kevin Williams – How We Dealt with the Chronic Problem of Too Much Data on a Large OLTP System
Kyle Hailey – Modern Approaches to SQL Tuning
Marco Gralike – The Ultimate Performance Challenge: How to Make XML Perform.?!
Mark Bobak – A Closer Look at Parsing: Possible Application Optimizations
Monty Orme – TBA
Neil Gunther & Peter Stalder – TBA
Ric Van Dyke – TBA
Richard Foote – Oracle Indexing Myths & Oracle Indexing Tricks and Traps
Richard McDougall – Performance and Sizing of Oracle on VMware
Riyaj Shamsudeen – A Close Encounter with Real World (and Odd) Performance Issues & Why Does Optimizer Hate My SQL?
Stephan Haisley – Streams, Xstreams and Golden Gate
Tanel Põder – TBA
Tom Kyte – All About Metadata; Why Telling the Database About Your Schema Matters
& Efficient PL/SQL — Why and How to Use PL/SQL to Its Greatest Effect
Vlado Barun & Edwin Putkonen – Deploying Database Changes: Performance Matters
Wolfgang Breitling – Anatomy of a SQL Tuning Session & Seeding Statistics

Just as a side note, I got an opportunity to speak at last years Hotsos Symposium. One of the functions at the Symposium is a social gathering which provides a great opportunity to talk to a bunch of really smart guys in a less formal setting. Unfortunately, a few of the participants over indulge at the party. Fortunately, many of them have a room at the host hotel (so no driving). Unfortunately, I ended up speaking at the first session the morning after the party. The audience looked a little like this:

Actually it wasn’t that bad, but I am looking forward to a better time slot this time around!

Hope to see you there!

I re-did my Upgrade to 11gR2 talk at the DOUG meeting in Dallas this afternoon. (I originally did it at the Cowboys Stadium for an Oracle Tech Day around Halloween). I promised that I’d post a link to the presentation, so here it is (just click on the image):

It’s the same presentation as the one from the original talk, although I got twice as much time to do it this time (worked out a lot better). Here’s a link to the post about that original Tech Day event with a bunch of pictures of the stadium, including a couple of Jerry’s data center: Cowboy Stadium Pictures

Well the talk went pretty OK. I did feel pressed for time though. Mainly because I had 53 slides for a 45 minute talk, but we also were running behind schedule by the time I got to do my bit. But we got through it. I didn’t get to go into nearly as much detail as I would have liked but that may not have been such a bad thing. The one thing I didn’t say that I had intended to was that 11g looks very similar to 10g unless you actively implement some of the new features. So DBA’s that are familiar with 10g should quickly begin to feel comfortable with 11g. By the way, I’m quite happy to entertain any questions on the presentation here since we ran out of time.

So anyway, without further ado, here is the link to the power point presentation: Upgrading to Oracle Database 11g Release 2

I also took a bunch of pictures during the tour of the stadium which I’ll post later. Here’s the most interesting part of the stadium for a bunch of computer nerds like us though, the data center!

Apparently, even the computer operators get to watch TV in Jerry’s house!

Update: – here’s a few more pictures!

Video monitors everywhere – including some just to show the logo …

Here’s my co-presenter Cary Millsap:

… just before we got to go into the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders dressing room. That explains the look on his face!

Continue reading ‘11g Release 2 Technology Day – Dallas Cowboy Stadium’ »

I am signed up to do a talk next week at the Dallas Cowboys’ new stadium (known affectionately around here as “Jerry World”).

The stadium cost approximately 1.8 billion dollars to build. It’s supposed to be pretty impressive, I guess we’ll find out. U2 played in the stadium last week. Jerry had to move the big jumbo-tron screen above the floor in order for U2 to get their elaborate stage set up. The rumor was that it cost about $1 million to move it. Small change compared to the overall cost of the project.

We’re supposed to be in the press room which only seats about 100. This should be a fun event not only because of the interesting venue, but because the list of presenters includes a couple of good friends (Cary Millsap of Method R and Sean Turner now with Oracle). The theme is 11g R2. I had been told the event was full for a while and originally the sign up page just had a number to call for overflow seating, but there is a link to register on the page now, so get in while you can. Here’s the link to the info page:

11g Release 2 Technology Day

Hope to see you there.

This evening I went to the grocery store with my wife, Jill. It was an interesting trip. I have to admit that I took a sneak peek at the shopping list before I agreed to go, and seeing that there were only 7 items on the list, I figured I could earn some extra points without spending too much time. Sneaky, I know, but I am a little weird about optimizing my time. By way of example, one of the main reasons I have a pony tail is because I once calculated how much time it took to get a haircut every month. The calculation went something like this:

Haircut Calculation

Time	Primary Action	Snide Comment
0.50	Commute to the barber shop	Everything is a half hour away in Dallas
0.25	Wait for an open barber chair	Not totally wasted because you could read the 6 year old copies of Field and Stream or the 10 year old copies of Lowrider Magazine – just in case I ever decide to go fishing in my newly restored 57 Chevy
0.75	Actually getting my haircut	Takes a little extra time because of barbers need to give advice on everything from re-wiring a house to colonoscopy
0.25	Paying up	Again takes a little extra time to listen to advice on tattoo removal (not that I have any tattoos, much less any tattoos that need to be removed, but it just seems rude not to act interested, especially to a guy that’s basically in charge of you public image)
0.50	Commute back to wherever	Can take longer if it’s raining because nobody can drive in the rain in Dallas

So that’s a total of 2.75 hours per haircut. Multiply that by 12 times a year and that comes out to 33 hours per year. So that’s almost a whole work week. That just seemed like too much time to commit to such an unrewarding task, so I quit getting my hair cut.

But I digress.

Back to the shopping trip. Like I said, the list had 7 items on it, so I expected a quick trip. Well we get into the store and Jill asks me to get a shopping cart. I’m thinking a little hand basket thingy would be fine, because I’ve seen the list! But I don’t want to tell her that (I’m still being sneaky), so I get the shopping cart. And we proceed down the first isle, stopping every two feet or so to put something in the basket. By the end of the first isle we have at least double the number of items on the list, and by the way, nothing has been marked off the list yet. Just to give you an example, we ended up with 4 bags of chips (Lays Bar-B-Que, Tostitos Scoops, Fritos, and Sun Chips). We’d have had one more (because part of my family likes the Scoop Tostitos and another contingent likes the flat Tostitos) but we had to draw the line somewhere. It wasn’t all my wife’s doing either. We were both throwing stuff into the cart like we were expecting a hurricane to cut off food supplies for the next several weeks. By the time we got out of the store we had 17 bags of groceries. They were the small plastic kind (which I don’t really like – I always say paper when they ask – but I digress again).

I found the whole thing quite amusing, although I don’t think Jill really did.  I asked if I could check the list while we were checking out, just to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. She didn’t really appreciate my humor. (we did forget one of the things on the list by the way)

Anyway, the experience reminded me that trying to get too clever can often backfire. It also reminded me that I am predisposed to make that particular mistake. Implementing a tricky solution to a problem, while it may be intellectually stimulating,  is often not the best approach. The experience reminded of a talk I did a couple of years ago (Creative Problem Solving for Oracle Systems) where I talked about several tendencies that all of us have (to a greater or lesser extent). And how those tendencies can interfere with our ability to solve problems. One of the points of the talk was that being aware of your tendencies can help you avoid pitfalls.

Like Clint Eastwood said, “A Man’s Gotta Know His Limitations”.

I did a little impromptu talk yesterday at an Oracle Tech Day. It was kind of a funny situation. They had a speaker that couldn’t make it, so they called me at about 1:30 to see if I could talk at 2:00. Luckily my office is very close to the Oracle office, so I said sure.

The topic was supposed to be something about upgrading to 11g, and I had done a talk a month or so ago (at a Dallas Oracle Users Group meeting) about some of my favorite 11g features. So you know how it works, when you’ve got a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. So I used the Power Point from that earlier talk and tried to tie in the upgrade theme as best I could. At about 3:05 I looked down at my watch and realized my hour was up (everyone knows that standard presentations are one hour). So I politely asked the audience if I should be wrapping up and they said, no you’re supposed to go until 4:00. Ouch!

Anyway, it wasn’t too painful, thanks to some good questions. Thanks to everyone who put up with the last minute sub. I promised to post the presentation materials. So here’s a link: 11g Presentation Materials