Well by now I’ve heard people making comments about how tired they are. I’m not sure if that is tired because their brain is worn out from the flood of information or because they’ve been staying out too late at events like last night’s Big Bash. Maybe like me, it’s a combination of the two.

Today was the last day of the Exhibit Hall, with the opportunity for free t-shirts and stuff. Since I would need a new dresser if I bring home any more t-shirts, the only time I spent in the Exhibit Hall was to talk to companies whose product I had an interest in. In some cases that meant I got to meet my Account Rep in person.

Big Bash or not, educational sessions started up again this morning and I could see any large reduction is head count from earlier in the week. I was able to squeeze in a few sessions today in spite of the time I took to rehearse my presentation one last time and test the setup in the Speaker Ready Room.

One of the presentations that I attended was titled “More Examples of Interpreting Wait Events To Boost System Performance”. Roger and Terry were careful to avoid the debate with the Hit Ratio crowd, but made it clear that the proper use of the Wait Interface (WI) was usually, in their experience, the best approach to tuning. In this 90 minute session, they quickly covered an “Intro To WI” and then showed 5 real-life examples. In these examples, they discussed what the user reported the problem as, what the WI reported and what the problem was and how they solved it. This was a great series of case studies that anyone facing a performance problem should read to understand the methodology they followed.

Anjo Kolk presented a session on the Wait Interface. Like some of the other sessions I’ve attended, the rating of advanced certainly applied here. Anjo started out with statements that should be obvious, but frequently are not. We need to remember that the end user doesn’t care about the hit ratio or what waits the database is experiencing. They want to get an order confirmation before the customer hangs up and calls the competition. He then dug deeper into the X$ tables than many dba’s understand. He also demonstrated with some examples of how the biggest tuning problems are not technical, but organizational and political and need “special” solutions.

After Anjo’s presentation, I went around the corner to deliver my presentation on “SQL*Loader Tuning and External Tables”. How did it go you ask? I felt good about the presentation and like a pilot friend of mine likes to say, “Any landing you walk away from is a good landing”. Seriously, I got several positive verbal comments from attendees and had more people in the room that I was expecting. There was also a lot of good questions from the audience, and one question in particular has given me an idea for doing some additional research in order to do an article for a technical publication. I’ll know more is 3-6 weeks which is when the Conference Committee said to expect the results from the comment cards.

Gary Goodman gave a great presentation that I would highly recommend for any optimization project. He gave 5 rules for managers of optimization projects. Two of the best, IMHO, are that project goals need to be aligned with the business process that it is supporting and that you need to track the return on investment and document gains and improve your ability to forecast improvements and costs.

Tomorrow is the last day and I know I have mixed feelings. It’ll be great to get home again and I know my family will be happy to see me. But I’m also a bit sad that the friends here will be parting ways soon and it will probably be at least a year before seeing most of them again. Also, I will miss the atmosphere where you can discuss a problem you are facing and have a good chance of including one of the genuine Oracle guru’s (or godesses) in the discussion. I’m looking foreword to Brownies with the Board tomorrow for the Annual Membership Meeting. There is always interesting information shared there about the user group movement.

So long for now.

The conference is almost over. What is the best thing for you about a user group meeting or conference?

Over the past 2 days I’ve been noticing the crowds and session “fill-ratio” & discussing this with other people. Sorry, I can’t find an appropriate “wait-event” to properly address crowd size. With no information available yet from the IOUG, the general opinion is that this year “feels” bigger than last year, but not as big as 2001.

Roger Snowden’s presentation gave a good overview on the buffer cache. He used very good images to explain how spin count works. The recommendation is that you probably should not mess with spin count unless you have a PhD in queing theory.

Kirtikumar Deshpande gave a great presentation on Automatic Undo Management. Some dba’s are hesitant to let Oracle manage rollback segments. The 9i database still allows us to maintain control in the same way we are used to, but this is not recommended by Oracle and in fact will most likely remove this ability in the future. This was a “quick tip” presentation which only has 30 minutes. Kirti used this time very well and covered this material quickly but well.

Richmond Shee gave a presentation titled 10046 Alternatives. This was really a session on 10046 Complements since he discussed how various other tools fill various weaknesses in the 10046 trace methodology. He also had a good table that shows when to use various tools. I didn’t see any place in this table where there was a need for any type of hit ratio monitoring. Richmond used humor well to help convey concepts that can be difficult.

I also attended a vendor presentation that talked about using 9i RAC on Linux. The speaker discussed the benefits of Linux and RAC. He said that while there is no required application changes to move from a single instance database to RAC, but in order to implement Transparent Application Failover (TAF) you need to enhance the application to deal with failover. I appreciate 2 kinds of vendor presentations. One kind gives information without pushing their product. The other kind gives me the product information that I want. This one gave me the information that they advertised and didn’t make me feel like I needed to be a CTO or CIO with a big budget and was expected to be ready to sign a purchase order.

I have had an interest in security for a long time so I guess it makes sense that one of the most impactful sessions I’ve attended so far this year was on Hack Proofing Oracle. Aaron Newman explained how to stop thinking like a DBA and start thinking like a Hacker in order to better implement security. He also gave several excellent demos on how hackers can exploit improperly protected databases and applications. This was a real eye-opener as to how security holes can be used to access data without any access on the server.

The annual Big Bash was moved inside due to rain. After the food, bar and band got set-up, the party took off. Since I’m presenting tomorrow, I took off early but the party was in full swing when I left and people were having a good time. I’ll be back tomorrow with more news, including a view from the other side of the speakers podium.

Do you have a specific security person or group that addresses security in your databases?

Rich Niemiec, President of IOUG, hosted the Opening General Session. Rich paid tribute to Dr. Codd & how he changed the world and noted the considerable lack of public awareness outside of the database world at his recent passing. He commented on the commitment to the concepts Dr. Codd outlined in his ground-breaking paper and how that spirit has been demonstrated by many people in the Oracle world.

Rich presented a couple of awards, including the Chris Wooldridge Award winner for outstanding volunteer this year is Tony Jedlinski, editor of SELECT magazine. He also presented the SELECT Editor’s Choice Award to Edward Kosciuszko for his article “Analytical Functions in 8i”. These are the kinds of people that make IOUG successful.

Rich then turned the session over to Emery John “EJ” Bodnar, Director of Marketing for Business Critical Systems of HP Americas.

EJ talked about 4 areas that show why he feels HP is the best partner for Oracle professionals. He cited the significant areas where HP & Oracle have entered into partnerships. He also mentioned the areas where Linux will complement HP-UX and HP’s Linux initiative. In his opinion, Linux fits best on Network edge right now and is probably not quite ready for mission critical databases especially since accountability better with non-linux vendors. One of the benefits of integrating both Linux and HP is the cost savings and portability that allow you to develop on Linux and deploy on HP.

Another area EJ discussed was the reasons for and the benefits of Itanium. The partnership between Intel & HP was announced in 1994 which shows the level of committment that HP has to the Itanium chipset. He said that Linux with Itanium are disruptive technologies that HP is poised to fully take advantage of.

Finally, EJ discussed RAC and the role HP (and historic Compaq/Digital) played in developing the RAC technology and one was customers can take advantage of it by consolidating onto fewer hosts and in the process save money and provide better availability.

One of the things that I value about this conference is the opportunity to hear different points of view. The “hit ratio” vs. “wait interface” debate has been simmering just below the surface. Today I heard arguments for and against these opinions. To try and focus on the technical points, I’ll deviate from my usual habit of identifying the specific presenters and just paraphrasing the points that were made in sessions that I attended today. Any of the presenters or attendees are welcome to add their comments in the talk back section at the end of this article.

Sometimes, it is not possible to identify the cause of a performance problem using aggregate.

The number of times that something was executed does not give any idea how much time that it took to run.

Hit-ratios are not the only tool to use in approaching a tuning problem.

Hit ratios can be proactive early warnings of a major problem.

Very bad queries can create an artificially high hit ratio.

These are some examples of the debate that I’ve seen so far. I know I’ve formed some opinions on the matter, but I’ll leave it up to other dba’s as to how they want to implement these various schools of thought into their database tuning activities.

William Vollenweider gave a great presentation on Key Compressed Indexes. One of the biggest benefits of doing this is the space savings that are possible. Also, in his testing, creating compressed indexes always has run faster than non-compressed.

The afternoon keynote speaker was Andrew Mendelson from Oracle Corp. He presented an update on Oracle 9i. He followed that with success stories from customers with a panel that included Rich Niemiec, Tim Gorman, Jared Still, Kirtikumar Deshpande. They each discussed their experience with 9i and what features were most important to their implementation of 9i.

Mendelson followed that with a discussion of some of the next steps to be included in future releases that will involve better managability built in that will make the database more self-aware, self-tuning and self-maintaining. I will leave it to the reader to decide how soon to expect these features.

Jonathan Lewis presented “How the Cost Based Optimizer works”, in which he presented a puzzle. He created 2 tables with identical data in two different ways and then showed how the same query acted differently on each. He then used this puzzle to show how when the CBO comes up with what we think is a non-intuitive plan, it is actually logical based on the data, layout of that data. This was a great presentation that provided attendees with a wealth of tips that can be used to enhance database performance.

A group of us finished the day after the welcome reception by gathering in the lobby. It was fun to put some names from mailing lists to faces. The general feeling was that the group was too large to be able to go anywhere and remain a group so we split up into smaller groups and went in different directions. The group I went with went over to Downtown Disney and did some shopping. Our group the split again as some people wanted to do more exploring and others needed to call it an early night as we dealt with jetlag and conference exhaustion.

This was another great day and I’m looking foreword to tomorrow.

What are your thoughts on the Hit Ratio vs Wait Interface debate?

Last year, I was able to attend a University course on Sunday. This year, I was not, in part due to other responsibilities which would have required leaving early.

Some of those responsibilities are due to my having been selected as a speaker this year. As a first-time IOUG speaker, there was a mandatory new speaker orientation. Now if you are like some people, the mere mention of anything mandatory makes you want to try and find some way out of it. However, this meeting was designed in part to help first-time speakers be as successfull as possible. The new speaker mentor, Mary Platt, has been sending gentle reminders and advice since our papers were selected. There was advice on how many slides you should have and what colors you should avoid and other things that made preparing for this a lot easier.

At the new speaker orientation, there was some new advice, something spending several years in toastmasters hadn’t taught me: avoid carbonation before your presentation . . . the bubbles have to go somewhere and you are wearing a microphone. There was also some common-sense advice, get enough sleep so you don’t give your audience the impression that you think your own presentation is a yawn. That is particularly important for people like me whose presentation is the day after the Big Bash. I guess I’ll plan on just having a little bash. All in all, I’ve been very impressed by the support Mary and the track managers have been giving the first-time presenters and consider this meeting as another benefit of being a speaker.

Another meeting was held for all speakers. Stan Yellott led the general speaker orientation. During this time, he provided information on room monitors and what their tasks are (help w/audio visual, lighting, etc) and on the speaker ready room where we need to check in and where we can test the audio visual setup with our laptops. Stan also introduced the conference comittee.

Following that was the General Orientation & Welcome for all attendees. Karen Langley covered the logistics and included important things like were to find lunch and snacks and the schedule of the big events (keynotes, reception, Big Bash). This was followed by some time for geographic networking. Tables were setup with labels for different parts of the country and world. This was a great opportunity to meet people from your own backyard and find out what you have in common (besides Oracle). I was able to meet several people from my area which makes it a bit less intimidating walking around several thousand people when you can say “hi” to a few more familiar faces.

As I discovered last year, many people I know by name from mailing list discussions were here. This year I remembered some by face without having to read their name tag and have been able to put more faces with names. Walking around the hotel lobby is kind of like going to a school reunion where you keep bumping into someone else that you know.

Later that evening a group started walking to find a place for some to eat, others to drink and for all to visit. We eventually found a place and had a good time. Some people even kept the discussion off of Oracle for awhile.

After reviewing the catalog, I’m really looking foreword to this week. As usual, there are more than a couple time slots that make me wish I could me in two places at once. Fortunately, a colleague from my company was also able to attend this year, so we are coordinating our plans to be able to attend as many sessions as possible.

That’s all for now folks. Stay tuned throughout the week for more updates…

Are you here at the conference?
If so let me know what session you are most looking foreword to.

If you’ve attended Comdex, OracleWorld or a local technology briefing, you’ve seen a presentation. Sometimes presentations are good, sometimes they are bad and many times they are somewhere in between. If you’ve never given a presentation, you may not realize what goes into getting ready for a presentation.

I’ve had the honor of being selected to give a presentation at the upcoming IOUG Live! conference in Orlando later this month. I decided to share the process to give people a peek into the “other side” of presentations.

I’m not going to say that the process I am going to describe is the best or the only way, just the way I did it this time. Suggestions from more veteran presenters will be welcomed. Also, anyone who attends my presentation is cordially invited to let me know personally (or via feedback here) if the process I used worked out or not or whether I should even try to present again.

The first step is getting a topic. This might be real easy like when your boss tells you that you will be doing a presentation on network security to the whole IT group next week. Or when you discover a new process to track down that elusive performance problem that keeps coming up. Or it can be real hard and you might not have an idea for a topic. That’s usually where I am, I want to share knowledge about Oracle databases, but everything I think of already has people with more knowledge or a better angle on it.

While doing a technical review for O’Reilly, I discovered how to enhance performance of SQL*Loader jobs. For those of you with a life (i.e. not Oracle DBA’s) that have not heard of SQL*Loader, it’s a utility to load data from text files into an Oracle database. That was obscure enough that I didn’t think there were very many people out there with a talk on this topic.

Topic securely selected, the next step is to prepare an abstract. The abstract is the super compressed version of your presentation. It’s what you would tell someone in a 10 second sound bite that would make them want to sit through an hour (or more) of this presentation. This is frequently what will be used to determine whether or not a given group will invite you to present. Make it count!

Next, you need an outline detailing what information you will put into the presentation and what points you will make for the audience. Make sure that you keep your abstract in front of you during this process so you don’t miss anything. For many reasons, you will want to have a white paper in addition to a presentation. Having an outline upfront makes developing the white paper much easier and you end up with a better paper.

Getting closer to the end now, you will need a presentation. Technically, you might not, but unless you are a supermodel, most people would prefer to look at something other than you the whole time. This is what will either help you keep the attention of your audience or send them screaming for the exits. There are many resources on preparing presentations, but some of the important points are:

• Keep it simple. Too much on one slide is confusing.
• Make it big. Remember your audience will not be as close to the screen as you are.
• Use color carefully.
• Make the presentation flow.
  

A good idea is to present this several times before your big day. Even if you need to go slowly so your dog can understand, the act of a live rehersal will make you more comfortable with the presentation. After that, if you can present it to an audience for additional practice, do it. Maybe an internal presentation to your colleagues at work or to a local user group. Make notes when people ask questions and you can add polish to your presentation.

Sometime during that process, you need to decided where you would like to present and start to find out what the process is for becoming a presenter. For many local user groups, the process is very simple and only requires an abstract and availability to get scheduled. For large conferences or paid speaking engagements, the requirements get tougher.

My abstract was accepted for the International Oracle Users Group (IOUG) Live! 2003 conference in Orlando, FL later this month. The final draft of my paper and presentation have been submitted to the conference committee and I am working my way through my final rehersals. Hopefully the time and effort I’ve put in to this presentation will make it worthwhile for the people that attend my session.

Anyone that is an experienced presenter that would like to make any pre-presentation suggestions for a good presentation, please either use the talk-back feature here or send me e-mail at stephenandert@hotmail.com.

Thanks

Have you given a presentation?
If not, why not?
If so, what have you done differently than I did to prepare?