Winter Conference 2009

Hosted by Oracle

February 12, 2009

at Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA

 



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

 

8:00 - 9:00 Registration and Continental Breakfast - Refreshments Served
9:00 - 9:30 General Session and Welcome - Hanan Hit, NoCOUG President
9:30 - 10:30 Keynote: Extreme Performance - Exadata - Tom Kyte, Oracle Corporation
10:30 - 11:00 Break
  Auditorium Room 102 Room 103
11:00 - 12:00
Session 1
Reorganizing Objects - When and How by Tom Kyte, Oracle Corporation    
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:00
Session 2
Empowering Extreme Scalability, Availability, & Efficiency for your Applications by Erik Peterson, Oracle Corporation Best Practices for Oracle Database Administration by Iggy Fernandez, Database Specialists DBA's Guide to Physical Dataguard by Ahbaid Gaffoor, Amazon.com
2:00 - 2:30 Break
2:30 - 3:30
Session 3
Oracle Data Integration For Data Warehouse Appliances by Miranda Nash, Oracle Corporation Performance Challenges and Tuning a Very Large Data Warehouse by Pichai Bala, IBM Tools and Techniques for Remote Database Support and Road Warriors by Terry Sutton and Richard Headrick, Database Specialists
3:30 - 4:00 Raffle and Refreshments
4:00 - 5:00
Session 4
All About Encryption by Tom Kyte, Oracle Corporation Hack Your DB Before the Hackers Do by Slavik Markovich, Sentrigo Seven Sins of Concurrency by Chen Shapira, Hewlett Packard
5:00 - 6:30 NoCOUG networking with Tom Kyte on site.
Food and beverages supplied by Oracle.

Mark your calendar for NoCOUG's Spring Conference:
May 21, 2009 at CarrAmerica Conference Center in Pleasanton.

 


 

Speaker Abstracts for Winter Conference

 

Keynote
“Extreme Performance - Exadata” - Tom Kyte, Oracle Corporation


Data warehouses are tripling in size every two years and supporting ever-larger databases with ever increasing demands from business users to get "answers" faster requires a new way to approach this challenge. Oracle Exadata overcomes the limitations of conventional storage by utilizing a massively parallel architecture to dramatically increase data bandwidth between database and storage servers. In this keynote, we'll examine these limitations and demonstrate how Oracle Exadata delivers extremely fast and completely scalable, enterprise-ready systems.

Auditorium
“Reorganizing Objects - When and How” - Tom Kyte, Oracle Corporation


A hotly debated topic is "do I need to reorganize/rebuild indexes and tables." We will discuss the times when a reorganization or rebuild is relevant, how to measure what you've done (to verify that the work performed did something useful!), and the best techniques for performing a reorganization of data.

“Empowering Extreme Scalability, Availability, & Efficiency for your Applications” - Erik Peterson, Oracle Corporation


A large majority of mission critical applications implementations are deployed on Oracle Grid stack (RAC, ASM and Clusterware) and attempt to follow Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture. While any application implemented on the Grid can benefit from gains in scalability and availability, a fuller integration will offer significant gains from empowering performance management (including debugging performance problems), better ability to efficiently meet service levels, and potential for even higher levels of availability. This presentation will help you understand potential gains and best practices in how to achieve them.

“Oracle Data Integration For Data Warehouse Appliances” - Miranda Nash, Oracle Corporation


Data warehousing and business intelligence are must-have solutions for the business, but what is the best way get all that business data from applications into them? This session will provide an overview of Oracle's complete line of data integration solutions with special emphasis on the data warehousing and warehouse appliance problem domain. Learn how the Oracle data integration solution can give you the fastest possible loading solution - in batch or realtime - for your data warehouse. Learn how the Extract-Load and Transform (E-LT) architecture is the best way to ensure high performance, easy maintainability and low cost for your warehouse operations. This session will include a hands-on demonstration for setting up an integration job and loading your data warehouse appliance.

“All About Encryption” - Tom Kyte, Oracle Corporation


From the dbms_obfuscation_toolkit, to dbms_crypto to transparent data encryption at the column level to tablespace encrypt and data pump encryption, we'll cover them all. We'll investigate which technique should be used and under what circumstances they should be used. We'll see how the keys are managed by the Oracle Database - or not in the case of the DBMS_ packages. We'll discuss "why" you encrypt and when encryption just does not apply.

Room 102
“Best Practices for Oracle Database Administration” - Iggy Fernandez, Database Specialists


What are the deliverables of the database administration role? How likely is it that the deliverables will be met if we cannot articulate them? In The Tao of Pooh, the clever little bear Winnie the Pooh, says, "If you don't know which to do, off all the things in front of you, then what you'll have when you are through, is just a mess without a clue." "Deliverables" are not the same as "current priorities" or "assigned tasks" because priorities and assigned tasks change from day to day. In this session, we discuss ten specific deliverables that do not change from day to day; the first is "databases that meet the needs of the business." One of the ten deliverables is a maintenance schedule and therefore we give special attention to the subject of database maintenance including backups, statistics, archiving, log file management, rebuilding, auditing, user management, capacity management, and patching.

“Performance Challenges and Tuning a Very Large Data Warehouse” - Pichai Bala, IBM


As DBAs, it seems we are more obsessed with the hidden parameters, new features, hints, cunning code,etc. But we often forget that the Data Warehouse is for the business customers and for them ease of use, data accuracy, data quality and predictive performance is of utmost importance. This presentation will share some of the successful strategies, death spirals faced and how we overcome the challenges with the often ubiquitous oracle features like Partitioning, Materialized Views, Space Management, Storage Strategy, Statistics Collection, views etc.

“Hack Your DB Before the Hackers Do” - Slavik Markovich, Sentrigo


Personal Identifiable Information (PII) of employees and veterans is being stolen from databases at an alarming rate, With tens of thousands of records containing sensitive data stored within vulnerable databases, government agencies and other organizations within the public sector are prime targets for data theft. Sentrigo will discuss how different attack vectors can be used to own the database - this includes exploits that are freely available on the Web and require no training. We will also explain emerging technologies, and demonstrate ways of protecting against database attacks. Learn about:

  • Secure coding practices
  • Database hardening methodology
  • Deep-scanning database activity monitoring
  • Achieving complete visibility into user activities on all monitored databases

Room 103
“DBA's Guide to Physical Dataguard” - Ahbaid Gaffoor, Amazon.com


Learn to configue Dataguard. Oracle Dataguard allows a standby database to be in constant recovery. The standby database is activated in the event of a failure at the primary database. This presentation presents the basics of setting up and configuring a physical dataguard standby database. A live demo will be presented using vmware based machines. A quick how-to on vmware and some vmware gotchas will be presented. Creation of a physical standby with minimal downtime will be demonstrated. We then distnguish between standby database maintenance and dataguard offerings. Failover and Switchover scenarios will also be discussed. Attendees should leave this presentation with the knowledge needed to setup, tune, monitor and manage a dataguard based standby database.

“Tools and Techniques for Remote Database Support and Road Warriors” - Terry Sutton and Richard Headrick, Database Specialists


Your world is flat. Your databases are behind a firewall in a data center far away, you work from home most of the time, and your colleagues are in different time zones or in different countries. Do you have the right tools for the job? Is the firewall stopping you from using Oracle Universal Installer, Toad, SQL Developer, and Enterprise Manager? This presentation will cover tools and techniques for remote database support such as VNC, rdesktop, virtual private networks, and port forwarding.

“Seven Sins of Concurrency” - Chen Shapira, Hewlett Packard


Databases are normally high-concurrency environments, where the number of concurrent processes ranges from tens to thousands. Yet many developers are either ignorant of the complexities and traps that are inherent in multi-process systems or wrongly assume that all of the problems will be correctly handled by the database. There are many ways in which code that ran correctly on the developer's workstation will slow down, crash, give wrong results or otherwise fail to scale when it is deployed in production environments. In this session, Ms. Shapira will present seven common concurrency mistakes that are well-known in computer science theory, yet often ignored by database developers. She will show test-cases that reproduce each problem within Oracle and give tips on how to identify the problem when it occurs in a production environment.

 


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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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