Oow

OSL - CPH - SFO. Starting on my route in a few hours. Really look forward to see tweeps and a bunch of people from the worldwide Oracle community. Lots of good presentations of course, but also bloggers’ meetup, Oaktable world, RAC Attack, Anchor Steam, and more. I’ll speak at the Bulgarian Oracle User Group conference 22nd to 24th of November. I have heard from many that this is a good conference. First time in Bulgaria means this will be a triple excitement; giving a presentation about something I have thought a lot about, seeing a new country and meeting a possibly different culture. ...

Last year was my first time at OOW. I made a write-up every day on my blog, but this year I will maximize, meaning it will be little time for blogging while being there. It is now less than four two one hours before I start on my trip OSL-SFO. Writing about what I plan to do seems like a great way to kill time. Also I’m doing some proactive jet-lag prevention research, may be staying up late will make the transition from CET to PT easier (or is it CEST and PST now?). ...

OOW has been great and I’m reaching the limit of how much information I can consume for a while. I’ll probably spend some weeks or months reading and understanding presentations. Time to go home and practice what I’ve learned. I’m not even going to try to report dutifully on every session today. Just say that I’ve been to Real-World Performance Questions and Answers, Oracle Database Optimizer: Tips for Preventing Suboptimal Execution Plans, Looking Under the Hood at Oracle Clusterware 11g Release 2, and Under the Hood of Oracle Automatic Storage Management: Fault Tolerance. The first one was great fun, 3 of 4 had more than 20 years experience in this field. The youngest “only” 8. Greg Rahn revealed they have a “secret”: they try to solve complex problems with simple solutions. Graham Woods advised people to ask Why? and understand what you are doing before you actually change anything in production. Simple guidelines, but since many are not following them it needs to be repeated. ...

Day four started well with Oracle Optimizer: Best Practices for Managing Optimizer Statistics presented by Maria Colgan. Then followed SQL Tuning Expert Roundtable with Jagan Athreya, Benoit Dageville, Tom Kyte and Graham Wood. These two presentations had a lot in common, correct statistics should be checked if plan is wrong, note correct, but not necessarily updated statistics. If an automatic routine for stats gathering cannot be found the metadata for the table and columns should be set manually and locked. More people talk about skews this day, it was mentioned here also, but I guess James Morle and Cary has more to say on that. The problem with histograms, bind variables and bind peeking is somewhat easier in 11g with adaptive cursor sharing, but not a 100% solution according to the panel. One 11g feature I’m going to look more into is extended statistics. ...

Went to five presentations, two of them stood out. Doug Burn spoke about SQL plan management in 11g and I learned some new tricks. The material and the content was quite good, also I like these comments that may not be in the slides, e.g. he quoted Jonathan Lewis who said that if you have a narrow problem you should apply a narrow solution, an advice against changing a system wide parameter just because you have one SQL statement gone astray. ...

Went to the keynote and five presentations. Keynote was a lot of show, but not much to bring home. Two presentations regarding database migration assistant for unicode, and Real Application Testing were relevant, but so uninspiring and lacked the extra stuff that it was like attending someone reading from the manual. Not much of a take away there either. Also went to a presentation on PL/SQL - Divide and Conquer, modularizing your code. I had hoped to hear more from Bryn Llewellyn, Oracle, but it was really Martin Büchi from Avaloq that had the whole show. Lots of usefull info, interesting real life case on how to structure enormous amount of code. Will remember this next time I get a chance to work with developers and have to look into refactoring of PL/SQL. It does seem to be something one can apply elsewhere in any large environment. Bryn is an excellent speaker, by the way. The two were clear that they did not want to sell consulting or anything else, just to share some goals and passion. I liked that, Bryn talks in way that could fool any DBA into write some code; wish he had a bigger part of it. ...

First day at OOW 2011 started with interesting presentations arranged by IOUG, very usefull stuff and I have to read the presentations again to get all the details regarding Oracle on VMware, and deploying APEX with security in mind. Highlight of the day was OUGN’s encounter for Norwegians at OOW 2011 and invited guests (invited VIP speakers for next years OUGN 2012 conference). This took place at The Norwegian Church Abroad . The church has a spectacular view over the city. Among the guests were Jonathan Lewis and Cary Millsap, two of my heroes in the Orace World. I had a long conversation with Cary regarding work, relationship between DBAs and developers, something we both have thought a lot about . I also tried to convince him to come next year and speak at OUGN 2012. Hopefully we can arrange for one of his one day classes a day before the conference.

This year when I was on my way to MOW 2011 in Denmark, a few months after I started at Keystep, my manager called me and asked if I wanted to go to Oracle Open World. That has not happened before in any other job I’ve had and of course I said yes, so here I am in San Francisco. Arrived late Friday, and spent Saturday adjusting to new timezone and walk around. First observations: really nice city, want to bring my family and see more. Also lots of nice people, with some exceptions from those driving car through the crossing of Lombart street and Hyde Street; they were pointing to the sky with wrong finger.