Summer Conference 2009

Hosted by Chevron

August 20, 2009

at Chevron, San Ramon, CA

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

The advances in hardware and Oracle automation features are going to have a huge impact of the job duties of the Oracle professional. This presentation explores the two-day DBA training program, the rapid server consolidation movement and other industry trends to show how the job of the DBA will move beyond compartmentalized duties and into a broader spectrum.

The Oracle Professional of the 21st Century will be relieved of the tedium of monitoring and tuning and be free to concentrate on other important database administration activities. This fun and interesting presentation will give the attendees a look into how their jobs are going to change, sooner than they think.

Key Points:

• Understand Oracle job consolidation
• Prepare for the role changes and save your job
• See how Oracle with adapt to upcoming hardware advances
• See how the Oracle Professional jobs will expand into new areas

Oracle introduced the mechanism for a self-tuning database with the release of Oracle9i and now Oracle11g has enhanced automation for many tuning actions. This presentation will show the enhancements to the Oracle automation tools and describe how they are used to manage the RAM regions within the Oracle11g SGA.

Using the existing data from the Automated Workload Repository and Automatic Session History tables, this presentation will show you how to create sophisticated scripts to detect anomalies and how to dynamically invoke the dbms_scheduler utility to automatically repair problems before they cripple the database instance.

This presentation contains indispensable information for any Oracle professional who wants to know how to automate their manual decision rules within the automation framework of Oracle11g.

Key Points:

• Understand how to spot repeating performance problems
• Understand the foundations of AMM and ASM
• Learn how to extend AWR to create your own self-tuning tasks with the dbms_scheduler package

One of the most daunting tasks for a DBA is to upgrade the database to a new version. Having to comprehend all of the new features and deal with potential plan changes can be overwhelming. The purpose of this session is to dispel some of the mysteries surrounding the query optimizer by explaining in detail the new optimizer features, including SQL Plan Management, and what you can expect when you upgrade to Oracle Database 11g. It will also include step-by-step instructions to help you prepare for the upgrade.

Partitioning is a key technology for addressing the requirements of large data volumes, for data warehouse as well as OLTP environments. Benefits are not only for performance, but also increasingly for manageability and Information Lifecycle Management. This session will reveal best practices and designs used by successful customers. Furthermore, it will provide an insight into less known details of how to get the best leverage out of Oracle Partitioning.

SQL efficiency is central to database efficiency, and the ability to interpret SQL query execution plans is a critical skill of the database administrator. In this session, we review the process of generating and interpreting query execution plans; the meaning of operations such as “Merge Join,” “Hash Join,” “Hash Group By,” and “Index Fast Full Scan;” and how to monitor changes in query execution plans using Statspack and AWR data. We also discuss how to generate graphical versions of query plans which are much easier to read than their more common tabular counterparts.

In this session you'll learn how to setup an Oracle database on an EC2 instance, configure access and have it persist across reboots. We'll also look at S3 (Simple Storage Service) for RMAN based backups in the cloud. Expect to leave this session with the tools to deploy your next Oracle instance in the cloud! We'll talk a bit about Oracle licensing in the cloud, then look at Amazon Web Services' cloud offerings including: EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute), Elastic IP, Elastic Cloud Front and S3 (Simple Storage Service).

The size of today's database system has grown exponentially in the past few decades. How to design and tune a multi-terabyte database for high performance? How to manage a hybrid database with both OLTP and OLAP data? This session takes an architecture approach to exam the following areas: storage layout, network pipeline, server and system setup (memory and CPU), physical database setup, logical database design, and application tuning. It provides tips and tricks on how to tuning a database for better performance. It also shows how to take the advantage of Oracle products and Features (Enterprise Manger, Exadata, Real Application Clusters, Real Application Testing, Partitioning, Advanced Compression, etc) to deliver high performance.

Oracle ACE Director Daniel Morgan will again dispense with the PowerPoints and live demo new and valuable capabilities in the latest release of the Oracle database.

Data protection and privacy continue to be a tremendous focus and risk for the IT community today. While companies are making great strides to protect data privacy in production application environments, the often untold story of implementing similar strategies in non-production (testing, development and training) environments is often overlooked. Bridging this “privacy gap” helps companies protect the most exploited areas of an organization's IT infrastructure - non-production application environments.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• The business and technical issues that drive privacy protection requirements.
• How to safeguard data - and what is often overlooked.
• Strategies that can be deployed in the testing environment to support compliance initiatives.
• How to leverage data masking techniques as part of an overall data management strategy.
• Real-world examples and lessons learned from organizations who utilized a data masking solution

Overview: Beginning in Oracle8 v8.0, the DBMS_PROFILER package has offered the ability to tune the performance of PL/SQL programs themselves, outside of the SQL statements they call (which are best tuned with SQL tracing).

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler supports logical and physical data modeling for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2. This addition to the Oracle SQL Developer family of tools provides forward and reverse engineering of database structures for all who work with graphical data models. In this session, see how to create a logical entity relationship diagram, with a choice of Barker or Bachman notations, and forward engineer the design to one or more relational schema diagrams. The session reviews various diagramming options and the set of Design Rules provided to help ensure your models comply with a set of standards. You hear about the implementation specific physical models and review the DDL generated for the models designed.

Oracle SQL Developer provides database developers with a powerful tool for database tasks. With too many features to demonstrate, this session demonstrates one scenario that database developers might encounter, touching many areas of the tool to illustrate the diversity and features it offers. The highlights include the SQL Worksheet with its code insight, snippets and templates, Reports, Oracle APEX integration, general schema copy and compare, and the integrated file navigator and source code control support. The latest release of SQL Developer supports unit testing and an integrated data modeler and we'll review these new features. The session closes with a brief review of new functionality planned for the next release of SQL Developer

Corporate databases and their contents are under siege. From outside the organization, criminals can exploit web applications to steal confidential information for financial gain. From the inside, databases can be compromised by employees and contractors with malicious intent.

SQL Injection, platform vulnerabilities, buffer overflows... databases are vulnerable to a myriad of threats and attack vectors. This presentation will use live demonstrations to trace the steps involved in breaking into a database, and present a reference architecture and checklist for implementing iron-clad database security measures.