It’s a long time since I have posted something here, I know. As you might remember from my last post I moved over to New York and well, there where a lot of things to do the last months. Anyway, I’m not writing here to make excuses. Fact is that I have been very busy lately. In my (new) role as “Performance Engineer” in the company I got new tasks beside my Oracle tuning stuff. Actually I spent most of the time in the last few months with tuning our Java application and not Oracle anymore. But I’m happy with that as this gave and still gives me the opportunity to learn more about the art of tuning! But this just as a short clarification why my Oracle related posts are so rare lately.
Anyway, today I had the chance to attend the New York Oracle User Group meeting together with my working colleagues. This was my first user group meeting at all so I was a little bit excited about what will be waiting for me there! As I took this serious I printed off the agenda already a few days back and marked the sessions which seemed to be interesting for me. One great thing I discovered was a session with Tanel Poder who I already know because of his blog (which I have also in my Blogroll of course!). Tanel is one of the few guys who shares his scripts with you. Most of the DBAs hide their secret, magic scripts for themselves to be the number 1 DBA. But Tanel provides his scripts to the world. You can download the whole catalog as a simple zip file from his website and well believe me he has a lot of scripts! Anyway, from the four sessions I have chosen three of them where performance related. Actually all of the sessions that I wanted to attend were performance related but unfortunately the first session about performance on SSD was canceled so I attended Arup Nandas session about upgrading to 11g and how database replay/standby database can help you minimize the downtime. Actually I had such a session already back in February in Vienna at Oracle so there weren’t really new things for me at the presentation. The second session was then the one from Tanel. It was about (his) scripts and tools that (can) make your life easier. Third session was from Dave Anderson about 11g Result-Set Cache. He did some life demos on it what was really cool. It gave you the chance to see result set cache really working and improving your performance at the response time. Fourth and last session was from Dean Richards – “Advanced SQL tuning”. This was a very, very interesting session as he had some real world issues in the presentation. He also gave an overview on which steps are important for performance tuning (knowing the background, triggering down the issue, etc.) After the sessions there were some vendor raffles. I hoped to win the 32″ TV but of course I did not! Actually I didn’t win anything! ;(
If I have to rate the sessions I attended then I would say that the best presenter was Tanel Poder. He was agile and brought some nice “real world” jokes into the session. There was not a single second in his session where you got bored or did pay more attention to your Blackberry than to him! The best session rated by the content would have been Dean Richards “Advanced SQL tuning”. He showed up important things about how to tune and how important it is to understand the whole story around it!
Well time for pictures:
Gerald on IT 