SPRING CONFERENCE 2006

Hosted by Lockheed Martin

May 18, 2006

at Lockheed Martin, Building 157, Sunnyvale, CA

See directions to the conference location near the bottom of this page.

All conference attendees, vendors, speakers and NoCOUG staff must RSVP prior to May 11th in order to receive a Drive-In Pass at the Visitors Center. (click HERE for a map). The same forms of identification are required as last year.

US Citizens: State or Federal Government photo ID (i.e. Drivers License, U.S. Passport).

Permanent Residents: Green Card along with State or Federal Government photo ID (i.e. Drivers License).

Foreign Nationals other than Permanent Residents: Due to more stringent security requirements imposed by Lockheed Martin and the Department of Defense, Foreign Nationals other than Permanent Residents are not allowed entry to the Lockheed Martin facility and therefore can not attend the meeting this year.

Also note: Cameras of any kind are prohibited.  This includes, but is not limitted to, camera phones and PDAs with cameras.

This presentation explains what hints are, and why the name "hint" was a big mistake. We will examine a few 10053 trace files to demonstrate that hints are orders - but orders that it may be impossible to obey. After looking at a few of the common misunderstandings about hints, we will go on to discuss the pros and cons of using hints, and the degree of care needed to use them effectively.

For years Oracle has been telling us to use the dbms_stats package instead of the analyze command to gather statistics to be used by the Oracle optimizer. But there are many options to dbms_stats, and your choice of which options to use can dramatically affect your results, both in accuracy of statistics and performance of the statistics gathering operation itself. In this presentation, we will discuss the effects of the various choices. The focus here will be on actual experience and performance, not on what the documentation says, along with detailed examples. We will examine the behavior in both Oracle9i and Oracle 10g. While, by default, statistics are gathered automatically in 10g, often the default choices are not the best route to take. Those attending the session should have some experience with gathering optimizer statistics.

An efficient database, application server, and network are important to the performance of an application. These components must be tuned generically for all applications running in the same environment. On the other hand, each application must be custom tuned for specific requirements and data. The best time to do application tuning is during development but adjustments to optimizations may also be required as the data sets grow. Often simple application tuning will yield dramatic results, regardless of the point in the application life cycle. This presentation starts by reviewing the objectives of application tuning. It then explains some best practices for making applications run most efficiently. It discusses on what to focus when tuning queries and INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations and provides tips for SQL optimization such as breaking up complex queries and using materialized views. It also describes several techniques you can use to make PL/SQL more efficient such as BULK COLLECT and FORALL. On the tools side, the presentation discusses techniques for tuning Oracle Forms applications in client/server and Web deployments. In addition, the presentation mentions a number of best practices you can use to make J2EE applications run quickly such as application module tuning parameters for Oracle's JDeveloper ADF Business Components code.

Network attached storage (NAS) has quickly evolved into an acceptable storage option for Oracle databases. Not all NAS offerings are the same, so an architectural understanding of the varying technologies is important. Concerns over scalability and failure points are relevant in the NAS technology space. After all, building scalability and availability into the server level is a waste of time if the storage doesn't possess the same characteristics. This presentation focuses on architectural differences between various NAS offerings and several topics to help understand why NAS is a reasonable deployment option for Oracle. To clarify the architectural issues with NAS, this presentation also covers a Proof of Concept of Oracle10g R2 Real Application Clusters attached to a new NAS architecture called Symmetric Multi-Headed NAS. In the Proof of Concept, this new NAS architecture was used for storing all database files, Oracle Clusterware files, Oracle Home and External Tables. Scalability, throughput and stress-test analysis with I/O-intensive Oracle workloads will also be covered.

Until recently, application developers faced a serious trade-off: Do you write an application that executes on the end-user's machine, requiring a startup download and specific user environment? Or do you write an application that sends HTML to the web browser, and limit user interactivity to submitting forms and receiving responses? Oracle has created JavaServer Faces components, "ADF Faces Components", that negotiate this trade-off and allow a relatively interactive UI that will run, without large downloads or a specific environment, in a standard web browser, and now JSF and ADF Faces are Oracle's preferred technologies for developing web applications. After a brief discussion of the general architecture of Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF), this presentation focuses on JSF and ADF Faces. It explains some of the most common components, how to bind them to your data, and how to use them to create a UI with much higher performance and interactivity than is common in web applications today. Finally, audience members will see a demonstration of the tools JDeveloper provides to help develop JSF applications. This presentation is appropriate both for those who have never used JDeveloper or developed Java web applications and those who are familiar with Java web application technologies like JSP, Struts, or ADF UIX but would like to learn more about JSF and ADF Faces.

STATSPACK has been largely misunderstood due to the inadequacies of the single report that is provided with it. In fact, it provides a powerful data warehouse of analytic data that can be used to quickly gain understanding of the trends affecting application performance. Like a data warehouse, the time-variant data in the STATSPACK repository can be mined in a variety of manners to analyze trends and identify problems and anomalies. As with a data warehouse, the perspective is high-level, but for some problems this high level of data is sufficient for a solution. For most other problems, the data is only sufficient to point the way toward a solution using a more detailed tool such as SQL tracing. As with a data warehouse, data is transformed into information. This presentation discusses very briefly how STATSPACK should be operated, and then delves into how analysis can be performed. A method and scripts are supplied and demonstrated. The amount of information stored within STATSPACK should be an eye-opener for everyone.

This two-hour presentation reviews the history of Oracle database services from their inception in Oracle8i through their implementation in Oracle10g Release 2. The material includes details of implementing workload management and high-availability options in the current release using services with connection pools, Fast Application Notification and load balancing options. The presentation focuses on the tools and responsibilities related to a DBA's role in managing services.

The presentation includes a live database hacking demonstration, talk about database security trends, and an interactive discussion with an experienced security professional. Learn about next generation blended database attacks (SQL injection, web worms, phishing, etc.) that can result in data leakage and identify theft, how dynamic database query profiling can prevent data leakage and identify theft, and trends in securing databases that address regulatory compliance requirements such as SOX 404, HIPAA, etc. The talk draws on Imperva's extensive experience in security assessments and penetration testing and Imperva's conversations with C-level executives of Fortune 500 and multinational organizations.

The ever-growing application environment has become a major challenge for organizations to address. Companies have more databases, more data, increasingly complex availability requirements, and security and compliance demands that can make a DBA's job more difficult than ever. In other areas of technology, teams are turning to automation and configuration management to achieve standardization and SOP - why should the database be any different? Matthew Zito will discuss strategies and tools for centralizing and automating database management that will save time and make the DBA's life easier.

Top of mind in business executives today is how to meet new regulatory compliance and corporate governance. New laws are changing the way companies collect, retain, and manage information. DBAs need to understand what is happening in the corporate business world and how it will directly impact their job role.

The complexity of managing databases has increased so significantly, some are considering outsourcing as their only relief. New regulations are driving IT governance that further increases the pressure on IT as ways are sought to reduce costs and still effectively manage the myriad of databases supporting business. Auditors, consultants, ITIL, COBIT, ISO, Six Sigma - what is an Oracle DBA to do? This presentation focuses on the new business challenges, best practices approach to managing relational databases, and where and how database administrators should be educating themselves and spending their time to be successful in business.