ODTUG: Day 4…

Day 4

“Analytic Functions Revisited” by Alex Nuijten was a great presentation. I’m sure lots of people left the presentation thinking, “Where has this stuff been hiding all these years?” 🙂 Incidently, Alex won the $500 prize in the PL/SQL Challenge last night. Well done dude.

I caught the last couple of minutes of “Why Isn’t Oracle Using My Index” by Jonathan Lewis. One of his suggestions was to take the lazy approach and go with the default parameters and functionality, which will work for most stuff, then spend your time focusing on the stuff it doesn’t work for. A man after my own heart. 🙂

“Thinking Clearly About Performance” by Cary Millsap was a combination of the messages Cary’s been pushing for the last few years. It was essentially a whistle-stop tour of his views on performance and why we should care. Very clean, very slick and very interesting. If you’ve been following #odtug you will have seen it described as , “The best spent 60 minutes of my 40 years of learning”, by one of the delegates.

“Performance Instrumentation” by Karen Morton focussed on instrumenting your PL/SQL applications using ILO from Method R, which amongst other things encapsulates the functionality of the DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO and DBMS_SESSION packages. One of the really neat things about ILO is it manages the call stack so the contents of the V$SESSION view is always correct, even when you are nesting procedure calls. This can be a pain if you are using the DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO package directly. Karen is a great speaker (I love her accent) and it’s so cool when someone presents on a subject you already know well, but still makes you feel like a kid with a new toy. 🙂

“Creating Sub-Zero Dashboard Plug-In for APEX with Google Visualizations” by Roel Hartman did what it said in the title. He showed how to create plugins using the Google Visualization APIs, which was a bit over my head, then how to use the plugins he’d made, which looked real simple. As the repository of APEX pluggins grows it’s going to get easier and easier to produce very stylish apps.

Cheers

Tim…