UKOUG 2012

UKOUG 2012

I am alive all thou I did not obey the first timer’s advice Health warning!
"You will not be able to fill all three conference days with presentations and come out of the other side in one piece."
I stuffed my days full of presentations.  I had time to:
* Talk to quite many people
* Walk outside at  the Christmas market - it started raining
* Visit the exhibition - many times and had good talks with many exhibitors
* There actually is someone using Oracle Workspace Manager out there somewhere, no presentations here

Attended sessions:

Oaktable Sunday 

12:15 – 13:00
Keeping it Simple in Database Application Development:  A Case Study
Melanie Caffrey, Oracle

Research to create manitainable system.
Get out of users way, do not throw errorstacks to users face.
Design should be centered around users needs.
Call your baby ugly -sometimes. The problem may be easier and more efficiently implemented using another approach than your hammer.
Simple is not allways easy.


13:05 – 13:50 Horrid Collateral Compression
Jonathan Lewis, JL Computer Consultancy

Deduplication of index compress and basic/oltp table compression.
Hybrid Column compression available in Exadata, ZFS and Pillar.
Describing the uncompress cpu usage problem while rowid access path


14:35 – 15:20 Guiding Practices for Gathering Optimiser Statistics (or Not)
Martin Widlake, ORA600

Collected during maintenance window. May be changed.
Sometimes beneficial to cather first primary key stats and other afterwards.
System, fixed object, dictionary and object stats.
Don't replace auto stats job.
Incremential stats on partitioned objects brake if even one (sub)partition stats missing or alter table add column.


15:25 – 16:10 Tuning Untouchable SQL using Profiles
Dan Fink, TZOD Consultancy

v$sql exact_matching_signature and force_matching_signature
category may be used to use profiles
alter session set sqltune_category='DEMO';


Evening ACE Dinner - Thank you Debra Lilley for arranging also this.

Monday

09:30 - 10:20
Opening Oracle Keynote
Dermot O'Kelly & Dr. Andrew Sutherland - Oracle

Whole stack. Hardware and software together. Did I hear correctly "We can put database to chipset" or was my mind wondering somewhere?
Comparing Social media to inhouse applications, structured data and processes. Social media is not an application.
It is a common service. How to handle integration in between?
Mobile access. Fusion TAP.
Big data value varies ease of tools ease of use. Oil drilling comparison.

10:30 - 11:15
KEYNOTE: Oracle's Latest Generation of Database Technology
Tom Kyte, OakTable - Oracle

12 new features next year


11:50 - 12:35
Creating Test Cases
Jonathan Lewis, Oracle ACE Director, OakTable - JL Computer Consultancy

Should have been titled Test Data Generation
How to generate rows
Distribution, physical location and index size varies depending how you generate rows
sql vs pl/sql
How to generate and run many statements
Use dbms_lock package to handle concurrency instead of a table row lock.

12:45 -

Benchmarking Oracle I/O Performance with ORION
Mr Alex Gorbachev, Oracle ACE Director, OakTable

First couple of slides. Orion comes with database binaries.



13:00 - 13:45
PL/SQL: Stop Making the Same Performance Mistakes
Tim Hall, Oracle ACE Director, OakTable - ORACLE-BASE.com

Use SQL instead
Bulk operations
Nocopy
Avoid using wrong datatypes


14:30 - 15:30
Is RAT Worth Catching?
Julian Dyke, Oracle ACE, OakTable - JulianDyke.com

RAT experiences traps
system time before replay


15:40 - 17:30
B-Tree Indexes
Jonathan Lewis, Oracle ACE Director, OakTable - JL Computer Consultancy

I attended only first ten minutes and was deilghted to see him using a book index example as I have been using allready when expaining indexing.


15:50 - 16:35
How to Create in 5 Minutes a SQL Tuning Test Case Using SQLTXPLAIN
Carlos Sierra - Oracle

What for
Investigate unexpected results
11g test case builder tcb
tc
tcx system generated column names missing use tc


16:45 - 17:30
Shareable Cursors
Christian Antognini, OakTable - Trivadis

Reason_xml information v$sql_shared_cursor sql_id and child# are not allways unique in v$sql when _cursor_obsolete_treshold reached v$sql_bind_metadata


UKOUG Exhibition drinks: 18:30 – 19:30 and SIG Focus Pubs: 19:30 – 22:30

Tuesday

Unlucky me my notes file got corrupted for tuesday


09:00 - 09:45
Are You Sure You Need Exadata?
Jonathan Lewis, Oracle ACE Director, OakTable - JL Computer Consultancy


09:55 - 10:55
Oracle Optimizer: Harnessing The Power of Optimizer Hints
Maria Colgan, OakTable - Oracle

Hints may appear not to be used


11:15 - 12:00
A Deep Dive into the SQL Monitor Report
Graham Wood - Oracle

Yes it is the best place to see ongoing problems. Only if it was available without tuning pack license.
The buffer might be a bit bigger that also long plans would stick in.
The plan page is using graphical presentation of the plan by default. Who uses such. Even Garham changed to tabular.


12:10 - 13:10
Controlling Execution Plans (Without Touching the Code)
Kerry Osborne, Oracle ACE Director, OakTable - Enkitec

About Outlines - SQL Patches - SQL Profiles - SQL Baselines
Profiles may work also with binds


13:25 - 14:10
Big Data Meets Big Process
Tristan Atkins - Microgen


14:30 - Unscheduled Oracle Optimizer roudtable with
Maria Colgan, Jonathan Lewis, Tony Hasler, Coscan Gundogar, Andy Colvin, Kerry Osborne, Cristian Antognini, Tuomas Pystynen, Jože Senegačnik and many others

Missed many other planned talks, but it was worth the sacrifice.


16:05 - 17:05
Cardinality Feedback
Peter Brink - Credit Suisse

Preferred to have good statistics


17:20 - 18:05
Oracle Exalytics - One Size Fits All?
Robin Moffatt - Rittman Mead

Timesten is a datasoure to obiee inside.
Sources may be other than oracle db
Obiee repository must be solid
Special relase of timesten for exalytics only available with exalytics
Summary advisor tool suggest most useful aggregates to timesten based on queries run
No incremental refeshes available yet
Just another batch stage in your etl
Loading through oracle staging db
or times ten may be used as a target of your etl
idea of ditching your dw
timesten may be used in cache mode not supporting materialized view sources

Wednesday

09:00 - 09:45
Capacity Planning, Simple and Without Tooling
Piet De Visser, Oracle ACE - Logica

Add a zero


9:20-9:50
Unconference
Tony Hasler

Talking about how a block corruption recovery became a sql tuning task. Looking forward for the promised blog post.
How to find high water mark


09:55 - 10:55
Oracle Optimizer: An Insider’s View of How the Oracle Optimizer Works
Maria Colgan, OakTable - Oracle

Future improvements
Adaptivity while runtime
Nested loops statistics collector has a tresholder. Reaching it changes to hash only on first execution. Format +adaptive +report will have swiching plan_hash_values during the first execution nl to hash hash to nl no additional parsing needed. All needed paths are allredy in the cursor.
Small buffering needed. Nothing is restarted.
Adapt parallel data distribution
Hybrid-hash
Change tresholds possible. That is the beauty how cost based optimizer works.
Dynamic statistics replaces dynamic sampling re-optimization new cardinality feedback used to age out when cursor ages out 12c stores that info as sql plan directives dbms_spd will create extended stats next time stats are gathered due to directives exists adaptive plans and statistics


11:15 - 12:00
The MODEL Clause Explained
Tony Hasler - Anvil Computer Services

May run parallel by model partitions


12:10 - 13:10
Really Using Analytic Functions
Kim Berg Hansen - T. Hansen Gruppen A/S

Aggregate funcions may be used mixed in analytic functions
Nice picking route and efficiency
Examples regr_slope to forecast


13:55 - 14:55
Exadata and the Oracle Optimizer: The Untold Story
Maria Colgan, OakTable - Oracle

Addressed the same issue Jonathan Lewis talked sunday and mentioned the soon to be available patch numbers to bypass the problem.
Do not gather system stats. Tested with defaults. Recomended for extremely slow hardware.
They will change the cost model too much.


No more sessions. Had a plane to catch. Originally half an hour change time in Amsterdam was a bit scary. The first plane left 15 minutes late. We made it as the other flight was one hour late.

See you hopefully next year in Manchester. Before that OUG Harmony.