Kerry Osborne's Oracle Blog

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.