Fall Conference 2009

Hosted by Oracle

November 13, 2009

at Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA

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

The Sun Oracle Database Machine combines industry-standard hardware Sun, Oracle Database 11g Release 2, and Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software to create a faster, more versatile database machine. It's a completely scalable and fault tolerant package for all data management, including data warehousing and transaction processing applications. The Sun Oracle Database Machine also includes Sun's new FlashFire technology to cache 'hot' data for dramatically improved transaction response times and throughput. This keynote presentation is your opportunity to learn how to consolidate all your database applications, store up to ten times more data, search data up to ten times faster, and make faster business decisions in real time without making changes to applications.

Introduced over a decade ago, Parallel execution is one of the fundamental technologies that enable organizations to manage and access tens and hundreds of terabytes of data by taking full advantage of the IO capacity on a system. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 delivers a milestone for parallel execution with new groundbreaking in-memory capabilities, along with a new automated technique for determining the most optimal degree of parallelism for every operation. This session will discuss Oracle's parallel execution architecture, its new ground-breaking in-memory technology, and other enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

This session will give you some simple techniques for Oracle capacity planning and performance trend analysis.

In only one hour we will not go into advanced topics such as queuing theory and scalability modeling, but rather introduce simple regression analysis techniques on existing Statspack or AWR data, which are easy to apply but yet give reasonably good results.

The idea is to give you the core knowledge and readily useable scripts and tools which would allow you to start performing common capacity planning and performance analysis tasks immediately after the conference.

We will be forecasting future CPU utilization, memory usage and IO rates, also we will cover how to handle performance analysis of diverse database workloads, changes in execution plans and constant data change.

As the title already says, this presentation has no slides at all!

Instead Tanel will demonstrate some of the most useful tools he uses for accurate Oracle performance troubleshooting. The toolset ranges from plain SQL statements to UNIX scripts and some custom-built GUI tools and of course Tanel's Oracle Session Snapper will be covered.

During the session you will be taken through few troubleshooting case studies following a systematic troubleshooting methodology. For anyone interested in Oracle internals and performance tuning, this session should be a fun learning exercise!

Real Application Testing is designed to simplify the testing of all DB infrastructure related changes including DB versions/patches, H/W, O/S and Real Application Clusters (RAC) by capturing real production workload and replaying the load against a test environment. The replay of real production workload against a test environment enables a DBA to identify and tune all SQL performance regressions and provide analysis on the overall performance impact of change/s introduced prior to production rollout. This method of workload capture and replay ensures the highest quality testing for Oracle DB infrastructure, reduces testing time and lowers testing cost.

How to identify an optimizater problem, why the optimizer makes mistakes and what to do about it.
Including modern and relevant SQL performance Topics:

• VST - Visual SQL Tuning
• TCF - Tuning by Cardinality Feedback
• RTSM - Real Time SQL Monitoring
• Hints, profiles and query transformations
• Extend Row Source Statistisc
• Plan stability

The execution plan for a SQL statement can often seem complicated and hard to understand. Determining if the execution plan you are looking at is the best plan you could get or attempting to improve a poorly performing execution plan can be a daunting task even for the most experience DBA or developer. This session examines the different aspects of an execution plan, from selectivity to parallel execution and explains what information you should be gleaming from the plan and how it affects the execution. It offers insight into what caused the Optimizer to make the decision it did as well as a set of corrective measures that can be used to improve each aspect of the plan.

For over 25 years, Sun and Oracle have collaborated to build highly available solutions with massive scalability, and unmatched performance and savings to meet the needs of growing enterprises. In this session, we'll examine the latest intelligent optimizations with the Oracle Exadata V2 Database machine, as well as innovation around key Oracle solutions such as Data Warehousing, Oracle 11g, Siebel CRM, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition

Oracle's Real Application Testing, which is part of the 11G release, allows businesses to quickly adopt new technologies while eliminating the risks associated with system changes. Real Application Testing combines workload capture and replay features with a SQL performance analyzer. This helps identify performance changes by replaying real-life workloads in the new database environments, as well as fine-tune these environments before they are deployed to production.
This presentation will explain the significance of Tier Testing in analyzing the behaviors of the database which cannot be detected with traditional user experience testing products. We describe how to use Snapshots Standby database as means to load testing. We will explore I/O testing with Oracle ORION as well as Availability load testing. We will conclude with a comparison to other database tier load testing.

Most presentations on SQL Query performance assume that the query developer is highly experienced in SQL and Oracle and focus on tracing and other techniques. However, many query performance problems are the result of common "anti-patterns" typically used by developers inexperienced in SQL and Oracle. This presentation will teach the attendee how to identify and refactor these anti-patterns, generally without the need to resort to tracing, changing init.ora parameters or other actions requiring DBA privileges. Each solution will cover identifying the problem, understanding why the anti-pattern causes a performance problem, the "fix" for the problem, and how the fix works. Where appropriate, the root cause of the problem will also be discussed

A basic understanding of how Oracle stores and retrieves data is essential for understanding performance issues. Such knowledge enables the developer to design scalable, high performance application code and data structures. By addressing scalability at the earliest stages of development, you can prevent expensive problems down the road. So this presentation is geared towards the developer, rather than the DBA.

After this presentation, you will be able to answer questions such as the following:

• Will an index help, and if so, what kind of index do I need?
• Why isn't my index being used?
• Can't I just iterate through my result set in Java, since it is so much easier than learning SQL?
• Why does my query work great on my development box, but is lousy in production?
• What is the best way to measure query performance?
• Since I am not sure which columns I might need, why shouldn't I just always "select *"?

TAF (Transparent Application Failover) is an excellent Oracle RAC feature that allows applications to survive RAC node failures. While there is quite a lot of information regarding TAF configuration and operation on the server side, there is much less information regarding client side TAF programming. This presentation covers:

• a quick guide to configuring TAF. Everything can be done in TNS -- no database reconfiguration necessary! the nine cases where TAF can affect your client side code.
• what TAF gives you "for free" and the cases where you must account for TAF conditions in your code.
• TAF-related database and listener error codes and how to handle them.

MySQL is becoming more and more popular as many businesses employ this open-source RDBMS in their IT infrastructure. For DBAs that have spent years working with Oracle, what are the big differences with MySQL databases? MySQL allows the DBA to make choices that Oracle doesn't allow and therefore, those with Oracle experience will need to adjust their expecations as they start to support MySQL. Assuming that MySQL provides the same features as Oracle can cause many problems, problems that can be avoided by knowing of these issues beforehand.