WINTER CONFERENCE 2006

was held

February 14, 2006

at Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA

 



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8:00 - 9:00 Registration and Continental Breakfast - Refreshments Served
9:00 - 9:30 General Session and Welcome - Darrin Swan, NoCOUG President
9:30 - 10:30 Keynote: Oracle Fusion Middleware Value Proposition for Oracle, Non-Oracle, and Custom Applications - Vijay Tella, Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Oracle Applications Server, Oracle Corporation
10:30 - 11:00 Break
  Auditorium Room 102 Room 103
11:00 - 12:00
Session 1
Lessons Learned from a Very Large RAC Benchmark by Hanan Hit, Transparency Software Active Session History: A New Performance Monitoring Paradigm by Kyle Hailey, Embarcadero Technologies Introduction to ADF Faces in JDeveloper 10g - Is it Oracle Forms Developer Yet? by Peter Koletzke, Quovera
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:00
Session 2
Advanced Research Techniques in Oracle - Part I by Tanel Põder, Integrid Web Services, SOA and BPEL -- A Primer by Basheer Khan, Innowave Technology Oracle SQL Developer (formerly Raptor): Introducing Oracle's New Graphical Database Development Tool by Kris Rice, Oracle Corporation
2:00 - 2:15 Break
2:15 - 3:15
Session 3
Advanced Research Techniques in Oracle - Part II by Tanel Põder, Integrid Testing PL/SQL with Ounit by Arnold Weinstein, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory SQL Tuning in Oracle Database 10g: The Do's and Don'ts by Mughees A. Minhas, Oracle Corporation
3:15 - 3:45 Raffle and Refreshments
In the vendor area.
3:45 - 4:45
Session 4
Access and Identity Management for Enterprise Portals by Rohit Gupta, Oracle Corporation Hibernate: A Persistence Layer for Java and Oracle by Joel Thompson, Rhino Systems Inc. Performance Diagnosis Usage Model in Oracle Database 10g by Prabhaker Gongloor, Oracle Corporation
5:00 - ??? NoCOUG networking and happy hour at Chris's New Harbor Bar, 150 Harbor Blvd, Belmont, CA 94002 Tel:(650)591-1881 (Cocktails only, no food.)
(Directions: Start at 500 ORACLE PKWY, REDWOOD CITY - go 0.2 mi, Turn on MARINE WORLD PKY - go 0.4 mi, MARINE WORLD PKY becomes RALSTON AVE - go 0.2 mi, Bear onto HARBOR BLVD toward US-101 SOUTH - go 0.6 mi, Arrive at 150 HARBOR BLVD, BELMONT, on the right.)

Mark your calendar for NoCOUG's Spring Conference:
May 18, 2006 at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale.

 


 

Speaker Abstracts for Winter Conference

 

Keynote
“Oracle Fusion Middleware Value Proposition for Oracle, Non-Oracle, and Custom Applications” - Vijay Tella, Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Oracle Applications Server, Oracle Corporation


Details coming soon.

Auditorium
“Lessons Learned from a Very Large RAC Benchmark” - Hanan Hit, Transparency Software


In this presentation we will review a very large benchmark which was conducted at Hewlett Packard´s benchmark facility in Houston.  The benchmark was developed in order to simulate and measure the performance of a merger of mobile phones enterprises.  The system described was required to support 64 million customers running a mix of interactive applications and batch processes.  The system was required to emulate 34,000 concurrent users by using 12,000 concurrent dedicated Oracle connections along with 500 concurrent batch jobs.  In building this benchmark we successfully demonstrated the capacity of this "very large cluster" as well as recommended best practices that maximized its efficiencies, based on systematic measurements of the performance gains that these practices provided.

Some of the Oracle RAC issues we will highlight in this presentation include:

  • The usage of HMP (Hyper Messaging Protocol), and its "scaling" capabilities in such a large environment.
  • Bind picking and the issues imposed while running in multiple nodes.
  • Illustrate the effect of tuning of UDP connectivity on the performance and scalability of systems this size.
  • Deadlocks and their influence on the overall stability of the system.
  • Some suggestions about hidden init.ora (spfile) parameter usage.
  • RAC load balancing and fail over testing and suggestion of the method to define the connection.
  • The usage of multiple block sizes.
  • Some suggestions on how to reduce the inter-node communication.

“Advanced Research Techniques in Oracle - Part I” - Tanel Põder, Integrid


Have you ever wondered whether there are additional diagnostics and performance data gathering tools available in addition to conventional 10046 tracing and V$ views in Oracle? Yes, there are--and there are many.  This session concentrates on some of those additional tracing and diagnostics mechanisms, which allow us to gather detailed information about Oracle behavior when conventional methods aren't sufficient or some specific problem needs to be solved.

The topics include:

  • overview of limitations with V$ views and sql_trace.
  • real-time manipulation of text trace output using a pipe and external programs.
  • advanced tracing (events 10200, 10201, 10005, 10704, 10706, 10134, etc).
  • overview of how event-checking works internally.
  • tracing OS operations, truss and strace.
  • tracing dynamic library calls.
  • dynamic and transparent OCI call tracing.
  • peeking variables and memory locations in Oracle.
  • how X$ tables work internally.

“Advanced Research Techniques in Oracle - Part II” - Tanel Põder, Integrid


This advanced level session is intended to be useful source for researching deep Oracle internals.  Some key low-level structures and operations are discussed, such is SGA memory layout and how to debug running Oracle processes for finding out exactly what is going on.  Usage instructions for various useful, but not that widely known tracing parameters and events are also provided.

The topics include:

  • mapping X$ table columns with memory.
  • using in-memory tracing facilities and X$TRACE.
  • debugging Oracle processes.
  • interpreting stack traces and binary code.
  • watching code segments/memory regions.
  • invoking an external debugger or executable on an event.
  • diagnostics in extreme circumstances.
  • calling Oracle kernel functions with a debugger.
  • some useful scripts for researching Oracle internals.

“Access and Identity Management for Enterprise Portals” - Rohit Gupta, Oracle Corporation


Many organizations today are moving toward enterprise portals as gateways to all of their enterprise applications. Enterprise portals offer a number of benefits. They can improve an organization's ability to predict and respond to market dynamics, enhance application user productivity, and simplify the management of information technology environments. To ensure portal manageability and usability, however, implementers need to give special consideration to the identity management infrastructure. For example, many organizations discover during portal deployment a requirement to consolidate user identities from a variety of directories, databases and applications. With this identity consolidation comes the need to deploy the administrative tools required to support user self-service and delegated administration. If heterogeneous applications are to be consolidated behind the enterprise portal, a single sign-on solution that can support a variety of application environments is required. Finally, if these portals are going to be made available to users in other companies or agencies, they need to provide the ability to support modern, XML-based standards for identity federation such as SAML and Liberty.

This presentation describes how organizations deploying enterprise portals can leverage Oracle Identity Management in their environments. We will begin by looking at a typical Oracle Portal implementation. Next we will give a brief overview of Oracle Identity Management. Finally, we will look at how various features and functionalities of Oracle Identity Management can be applied to the portal environment. While our examples will focus on an Oracle Portal implementation, it is important to note that the benefits described in this presentation may be leveraged in homegrown and third party portal deployment environments as well.

Room 102
“Active Session History: A New Performance Monitoring Paradigm” - Kyle Hailey, Embarcadero Technologies


Oracle version 10g introduces a new performance table called "v$active_session_history," also known as ASH.  ASH heralds a new era of statistical sampling for performance monitoring as opposed to "exact" statistical collection.  Statistical sampling can be more powerful, effective and efficient than older methods.  Using ASH, system performance can be monitored, alerted on and bottlenecks pinpointed in seconds with a few SQL statements with low resource usage overhead.  Learn also how ASH can be simulated on any version of Oracle from version 7 through 10.  These same tuning methods can be applied to operating systems and other databases.

“Web Services, SOA and BPEL -- A Primer” - Basheer Khan, Innowave Technology


With Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) gaining widespread adoption and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) becoming the latest industry buzzword, many enterprises are wondering how best to embrace this new software architecture standard that is slated to become the prevailing software engineering practice by 2008. This educative presentation will introduce you to Web Services, SOA and BPEL. The presentation will also include a short demonstration of the power of BPEL to integrate applications and how to leverage it to jumpstart SOA adoption within your enterprise.

“Testing PL/SQL with Ounit” - Arnold Weinstein, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory


Software testing is a process used to identify the correctness, completeness and quality of developed computer software.  Actually, testing can never establish the correctness of computer software, as this can only be done by formal verification.  It can only find defects, not prove that there are none.  There are many approaches to software testing, but effective testing of complex products is essentially a process of investigation, not merely a matter of creating and following rote procedure.  Ounit is a utility that helps Oracle developers unit test their PLSQL code faster, easier and more comprehensively than ever before.  Ounit offers a powerful graphical interface to utPLSQL, the open source unit testing framework for the Oracle PL/SQL language.  With Ounit, you can simply point and click your way through testing sessions, and instantly see the outcomes.  Because testing is easier and faster you will test more frequently and more thoroughly.

“Hibernate: A Persistence Layer for Java and Oracle” - Joel Thompson, Rhino Systems Inc.


What are persistence layers and what can they do for you as a developer? What are the functionalities and features of a persistence layer? In this presentation we will sample a popular technology called Hibernate.  Hibernate is an open source persistence layer that you use by specifying an XML file that maps plain old Java beans with the actual database tables.  In the XML file you can specify complex relationships, like One to Many and Many to Many.  In addition to the Hibernate technology, we'll discuss some common design patterns.  Hibernate is not a panacea for your database I/O, and does have some drawbacks, which will be discussed.

Room 103
“Introduction to ADF Faces in JDeveloper 10g - Is it Oracle Forms Developer Yet?” - Peter Koletzke, Quovera


Oracle has long offered tools that assist with designing, developing, and deploying applications; its current focus is with the Java IDE, JDeveloper. JDeveloper 10g (release 10.1.3) offers a new set of features, libraries, and methods, Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces, which promises to simplify Java development tasks. The tools that JDeveloper provides to work with ADF Faces allow development of J2EE web applications in an environment that is closer to Oracle Forms than anything previously released. In addition to standard editors and wizards, ADF in JDeveloper simplifies the formerly daunting task of connecting front-end Java code to database elements -- something Oracle Forms developers have long taken for granted.

This presentation describes ADF and ADF Faces and how they can assist with development of a Java-based application. It briefly explains the ADF framework and why the JavaServer Faces (JSF) foundation of ADF Faces is more developer-friendly than previous Java technologies. It also demonstrates development of a sample ADF Faces application including Model, View, and Controller code. Finally, the presentation draws some conclusions about whether it really is possible to achieve the productivity of an Oracle Forms environment using this release of JDeveloper.

“Oracle SQL Developer (formerly Raptor): Introducing Oracle's New Graphical Database Development Tool” - Kris Rice, Oracle Corporation


As a DBA or Database Developer, do you use a variety of tools to browse database objects, create and run SQL, and edit and debug PL/SQL?  Raptor is Oracle's newest graphical alternative to SQL*Plus, allowing the Database Developer a convenient way to perform basic tasks.  With Raptor you can manage objects in Oracle databases.  You can browse, create, edit, and delete (drop) database objects; create, edit, and debug SQL statements and PL/SQL code; manipulate data; export and import database objects; and create reports.  You can connect to any target Oracle database schema using standard Oracle database authentication.  In this session we introduce Raptor and, using demonstrations, show the user the new functionality available today.

“SQL Tuning in Oracle Database 10g: The Do's and Don'ts” - Mughees A. Minhas, Oracle Corporation


As part of Oracle's ongoing strategy to make the database more self-managing, Oracle 10g has introduced two new solutions, SQL Tuning Advisor and SQL Access Advisor, which together can eliminate the need for manual tuning. Users can now let the Oracle database tune their enterprise applications for them. This paper discusses the two new advisors, describing the internals of how they work, best practices for their usage, their limitations, and their benefits

“Performance Diagnosis Usage Model in Oracle Database 10g” - Prabhaker Gongloor, Oracle Corporation


Oracle Database 10g has a rich set of capabilities that make the identification of root-cause of performance problems quick and easy.  This presentation discusses the usage model in terms of various diagnostic solutions that are available, when to use which solution, and their most effective use.  It covers functionality introduced in Oracle 10.2 that allows DBAs to analyze transient performance problems, and compare current and historical performance to baselines (preserved snapshot sets) to detect changes in configuration and workload.

 


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Directions to the Oracle Conference Center

Address:
350 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, California.  Phone: 650-633-8300 Fax: 650-633-8399

Southbound-
Take Highway 101 South (toward San Jose) to the Ralston Ave./Marine World Parkway exit.  Take Marine World Parkway east which will be left at the light.  Make a left onto Oracle Parkway.  350 Oracle Parkway will be on the right.

Northbound-
Take Highway 101 North (toward San Francisco) to the Ralston Ave./Marine World Parkway exit.  Take the first exit ramp onto Marine World Parkway.  Make a left at the first light onto Oracle Parkway.  350 Oracle Parkway will be on the right.  

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