NoCOUG's August 23, 2001 Meeting

Our August 23, 2001 meeting was held at Chevron Park in San Ramon. Some of the presentations from the meeting are available for download. Meeting Description The August 23, 2001 meeting had parallel sessions on the topics of database administration and data warehousing. The agenda and session descriptions were as follows: 08:00-09:00  - Registration and Welcome - Refreshments served 09:00-09:45  - Opening Remarks and Announcements 09:45-10:30  - Keynote: "OTN as a Developer Service Provider"      Robert Dell'Immagine, Director, Oracle Technology Network,      Oracle Corporation 10:30-11:00  - Morning Break 11:00-12:00  - Parallel Session #1: DBA Data Warehousing "Oracle Performance Management - A Radical Approach" Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha, Director of Storage Management Products, Quest Software "Semantic Integration of Data from Multiple Sources into a Common Database" Michael Scofield, Director of Data Quality, Experian Information Solutions 12:00-01:15  - Lunch Break 01:15-02:15  - Parallel Session #2: DBA Data Warehousing "Oracle Performance Management - A Radical Approach" continued "Semantic Integration of Data from Multiple Sources into a Common Database" continued 02:15-03:00  - Afternoon Break 03:00-04:00  - Parallel Session #3: DBA Data Warehousing "Oracle Advanced Queuing: An Overview" Hamid Minoui, Oracle DBA, Fritz Companies, Inc. "SQL Optimization for the Data Warehousing Environment" Frank Irizawa, Principle Systems Engineer, Lecco Technology 04:15-???  - NoCOUG Reception / No Host Bar at O'Kane's in San Ramon "OTN as a Developer Service Provider": In this presentation, Robert will go into some detail about how Oracle Technology Network, OTN, is evolving from a technical information source into a provider of services (such as Oracle Portal Studio and Oracle Mobile Studio) that increases developer and DBA productivity and reduces costs. Oracle Corporation has discussed this direction with industry analysts, and they've received the messages positively. Come get a good inside view into what's happening at OTN. "Oracle Performance Management - A Radical Approach": Oracle performance tuning has developed a reputation as part science, part art, and part wizardry. This seminar will impart the core principles of performance management by sharing a step-by-step process of iteratively investigating, determining, and implementing tuning solutions using a proven methodology. This time-tested and field-proven methodology looks at performance management as having a system-wide scope. Further it steers you away from the old bad habit of simply throwing more memory at Oracle’s shared memory areas. This seminar propagates the idea that the bulk of possible performance gains can be achieved quickly and with minimal effort, if you truly know how to identify and understand the nature of your system and more importantly its bottlenecks. And we will do this without checking one infamous cache hit ratio within Oracle. "Semantic Integration of Data from Multiple Sources into a Common Database": More and more, data stewards are being asked to integrate data from multiple, dissimilar sources into a common database. This can be because of mergers, acquisitions, CRM efforts, or building other types of data warehouses. To accurately map source field to target (as well as to design the target database), the analyst must completely understand the full semantic meaning of each source data element, and how it behaves over the entire scope of source data. It is not enough to note similarity of format and field-name. This presentation will demonstrate practical techniques for the evaluation of source data (sometimes known as data profiling or domain studies) and show examples of the kinds of surprises which can lurk in production databases which are not thoroughly examined. We show the folly of relying solely on old documentation or data directories. Finally, we will survey techniques of establishing an on-going data surveillance program to ensure that later production-ized loads of data will not be caught by surprise when a source changes definitions or scope of the data it supplies. "Oracle Advanced Queuing: An Overview": In this presentation Hamid will discuss Oracle's advanced queuing facility, initially at a high level and then drilling down into detailed examples. Topics will include messaging concepts, the differences between synchronous and asynchronous messaging architectures, Oracle's features to support queuing, APIs and commands for creating queues and enqueuing and dequeuing messages, and an example that walks through the process of queue setup and use. "SQL Optimization for the Data Warehousing Environment": The key to top-performing database applications is found in the heart of the application: the SQL statement. Studies show that more than half of database performance problems are a direct result of under-performing SQL statements. This highlights the importance of optimizing your SQL to prevent database performance problems. This presentation shows a SQL tuning methodology for data warehousing and gives a detailed overview of techniques for tuning SQL statements to optimize the performance of data warehouse applications. Principles of query optimization and Oracle optimization features for data warehousing are presented. Attendees will see query tuning tips with multiple examples. If you have suggestions for future meetings or would like to offer feedback on previous meetings, then please complete our online survey or send us an email. Directions to Chevron Park in San Ramon Address: Building A is located at 6001 Bollinger Canyon Road in San Ramon. From Highway 680 South: Take Highway 680 south to the Bollinger Canyon Road exit. Turn left onto Bollinger Canyon Road, heading east (back over the freeway). At Chevron Park Circle, turn right. Building A will be on the left-hand side and parking will be on the right. From Highway 680 North: Take Highway 680 north to the Bollinger Canyon Road exit. Turn right onto Bollinger Canyon Road, heading east. At Chevron Park Circle, turn right. Building A will be on the left-hand side and parking will be on the right.