Here goes…
“Making the Most of PL/SQL Error Management Features” by Steven Feuerstein – This presentation covered a number of aspects of error trapping available in PL/SQL, including new features in 10g and overall methodology. It was pitched more for beginners and those new to 10g, so there wasn’t a great deal for me. I guessed this from the title, but this was the only Steven Feuerstien presentation I could get to and I really wanted to hear him speak. He’s a great presenter and comes across as a really relaxed and “low temperature” guy. I hope in the future I’ll get to hear him speak on something a little more meaty.
“Sifting Through the ASHes: Advanced Database Performance Tuning Using Active Session History” by Graham Wood – Here we got an overview of how ASH works and what information you can get from it. Essentially, it’s pitched as filling the gap between AWR and SQL_TRACE. The line of argument goes, AWR isn’t realtime and SQL_TRACE is too expensive to have running for all sessions all the time. ASH doesn’t give you as much information as SQL_TRACE, but it’s running all the time, so you get realtime sampling not available from AWR. Pretty good for looking at current problems!
“Welcome to My Nightmare: The Common Performance Errors in Oracle Databases” by Michael Ault – Mike listed some of the major problems he has seen over the last few years of consulting and discussed possible solutions to them. Lots of the people near me were writing furiously, so I guess it went down well.
“Tuning SQL When You Cannot Change the Code” by Dan Hotka – Dan started at a furious pace, banging through lists of ways to affect execution plans for packaged or third party applications. Some of it was pretty obvious, some of it not so obvious. About half way through the hour slot he reached the end of his presentation, then it became apparent he had got the times mixed up and believed he only had 30 minutes. At this point the reason for the furious pace became obvious.
“Dell IT: Get Beyond Oracle Real Application Clusters and Start Deploying an Enterprise Grid Architecture” by Logan McLeod and Kirk McGowan – I advise people to look at some of the figures in this paper. These guys have a serious amount of servers and Oracle power. It makes most of our RAC look like hobby systems. I wish I had got to the technical session on this earlier in the week. Apparently they’ve automated RAC setup to the point where they can install and configure a whole RAC in approximately 30 minutes from booting the hardware to completion. Wild!
I got talking to a guy called Rick at the end of the last session and I ended up chatting to him during the whole of the two hour “It’s a Wrap!” party. He was making notes using Mind Mapper Pro, which I’ve seen before, but never used. We started talking about that, which turned into a general chat about writing, then I mentioned my website and finally we both went into full geek mode. Very cool! 🙂 It’s been really fun meeting and talking to all the people at the conference.
So now it’s over. I’ll probably write a Wrap-Up blog entry in a few days, once it’s all sunk in. So that’s goodbye to OpenWorld, but I still have a few more days in the USA!
Cheers
Tim…
