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AUSOUG Melbourne…

I had one day to myself in Melbourne before the conference started, so I asked the hotel concierge what I needed to see. I followed his itinerary almost to the letter and got to see a fair bit, which was cool.

Melbourne feels very different to the other cities I’ve been to in Australia. The other cities feel very functional, but the central business district of Melbourne feels more like a city designed for socializing in. It has a very central European feel to me. Not at all what I expected.

Anyway, back to the conference. The work I did on my talk really paid off. The change to the first half really made a difference. Sometimes the demos actually obscure the message, rather than enforcing it. Removing them from the first half of the talk gave it a lot more punch and made it feel like I was staying on message, rather than demoing for the sake of it.

I’m a bit annoyed I didn’t see this before the Perth event, but that’s life. A big thank you to Connor McDonald and Chris Muir for there input on that. A few well placed words from people with their experience can really help a newbie like me big-time.

So a big thanks to all involved in the event. It was really cool to come back and hook up with everyone again. Also a big thank you to the people who came to my sessions. You never know what the future brings, but I hope I get to come back again.

I fly home today. I’m leaving quite late, so I’ve got to fill the day. I always find it hard to do that the day of the flight. I spend the whole day worrying about missing the flight rather than enjoying myself. I’ll probably end up spending most of the day in the airport being really bored before spending 21 hours on a plane. 🙂

See you on the other side…

Cheers

Tim…

Refocussing my presentation…

The plane journey from Perth to Melbourne turned out to be very productive. I’ve made some substantial changes to my presentation. The content is the same, but as I suggested in my previous post, I’ve de-emphasized some bits and emphasized others.

I guess my presenting style is based very much on the way I write articles on my website. I’m not a fan of reading overly “wordy” articles. Instead I want a cut & paste example that gives me a feel for the feature/issue. I can then play around with that to get more familiar with the technology.

Well that works fine for a lot of database and development presentations, but not all of them.

This particular presentation has two distinct halves. The first half really doesn’t lend itself to demos and the copy & paste mentality and the second half does. It’s still early days for me as far as presenting is concerned, and this presentation has reminded me of that again. Fortunately there are a few old hands around that give some pretty good advice.

So what I have now delivers the message I want to deliver, but I think does it in a much more sensible way. I’m a bit annoyed I didn’t see this before I presented in Perth, because it didn’t take much time to repackage, but that’s life. Sometimes, when you are too close to something you can’t see the wood for the trees.

So in a few minutes I’m off to get a plane to Canberra to do a presentation to a local user group. I’m not totally sure yet how much time I have to present, so that one will be a bit more “seat of the pants”. 🙂

I’ll be back in Melbourne tomorrow where I will hopefully get to see a bit of the city before the next AUSOUG event starts.

Cheers

Tim…

AUSOUG Perth…

The Perth event is now done and dusted.

The day before the conference, Chris Muir took Lucas Jellema and myself on a little tour of the city. I slept OK the night before so I felt pretty good. That night I didn’t sleep at all. Not one minute. By the morning I felt OK so I went to the conference as planned. About 30 minutes into the first talk it was game over. I went back to the hotel and slept for about 3 hours.

When I got back I spent the rest of the day in Lucas’ session about “SOA for Database Professionals”. Lucas is a great speaker, which is even more impressive when you consider it’s not his first language. I shall try and catch the bits I missed at the Melbourne event.

The next day I spent the morning at Connor McDonald’s SQL sessions. I guess everyone knows by now Connor is a great presenter. Not surprisingly, he won the Best Speaker prize for this event. Shock Horror! 🙂

I had the afternoon session on day 2. I’d presented several elements of this session before, but never as a single block all together. The session was about 1 hour 45 minutes. It went OK, but I wasn’t really happy with it. A few of the demos towards the end failed. I’ve been playing with them since and it seems to be an issue with browser authentication in Firefox and Safari, rather than a fundamental technology issue. It seems that often, once you authenticate through the browser (to XML DB or EPG), subsequent authentications to different users ignore the new credentials and continue to try and authenticate with the old details. Just about the only way to make it consistent is to reboot between demos, which isn’t going to happen. Authentication via WebDAV or FTP works as expected. I’ve got a couple of ideas I’m gonna work on tonight for workarounds.

Anyway, once the talk was over I got a bit of feedback from some of the guys and I think I’m gonna revise a couple of bits of the talk for Melbourne. Emphasize a couple of bits and deemphasize others etc. Hopefully that will give it a little more punch.

This morning was … interesting. I got up early and started to do a bit of work. After a few hours I checked my flight details, even though I was sure my flight was at 17:10. Turns out that was my arrival time at Melbourne. My departure time from Perth was actually 10:50. My first reaction was I had missed my flight. Fortunately I had been up since 04:00, so even though I had been working for ages I was still in time for my flight. As I’ve said before, travel is never easy for me. 🙂

I did some frantic packing, threw my rucksack over my back, at which point my laptop flew across the room and landed on the floor. Seems I forgot to zip the pocket. Fortunately MacBooks are pretty solid so there doesn’t seem to be any damage.

Time to get on another plane and change time zone again…

Cheers

Tim…

Traveling is never easy… for me…

This morning I’m traveling to Perth, Australia for the start of the AUSOUG Conference Series. The thought of 19 hours in a plane is not exactly thrilling, especially after the turbulence during my last flight, but I can manage that sort of stress, just about.

In an attempt to be efficient I completed the online check-in and all looked good. Then the taxi was 20 minutes late (stress +1). I got to the airport and dropped of my bag and went to security, where I was turned away because of a duplicate seat allocation (stress +1). I went back to the check-in desk, where they found no such problem, but printed new tickets for me. I got through security the second time, then was told the plane was delayed by about 30 minutes, which has now become 40 minutes and counting. So I’ve got about 9 hours until I know if I will make my connection (stress +lots).

This international travel is a pain in the <insert word of your choice>!

Cheers

Tim…

Update: The seat was double booked, despite what the check-in desk said. Luckily there were spaces on the plane. I guess it makes sense to board early because it seems like the person sitting down is the person in control.

I made it on to the second leg OK. I was between a couple, so I got to snag an aisle seat which was lucky.

So I’m here in Perth…

Doc Updates?

Howard Rogers noticed an issue with one of his utilities that is relevant to the majority of 10g/11g installation guides on the net and on Metalink. It looks to me like there has been a documentation change at some point. I’ve altered my 10g and 11g installation articles to comply with the current documentation recommendations.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2009…

Here is a delayed final OOW post. The flight home was a nightmare. There was lots of turbulence for the first couple of hours. I got to the point where I just wanted us to crash and die because I was sick of waiting for it to happen. It all calmed down again, but every time there was a slight movement of the plane I expected it to start so it was not a pleasant flight in total…

I arrived home to find my central heating was broken, which is why I’ve not posted. It was too cold to use the computer. I just stayed in bed for a couple of days trying to stay warm and get over the jet lag…

The heating is sort-of fixed now… A guy is coming tomorrow to finish the job…

OpenWorld was noticibly quieter this year, which reduced the spectacle somewhat, but made life a lot simpler navigating round the place. I mentioned previously, I felt this year was my best OpenWorld. I think it took the first few visits to get my head into the right place to get the most out of it. The quality of the sessions in the unconference was amazing. I think most conferences would be happy if they were their headlining sessions. The unconference is probably the most important bit of OpenWorld for me now.

A big thanks to the OTN crowd for organizing the trip. Big thanks also to the ACE program for covering the costs. In the current climate, I’m not sure how long that will continue, but while it does I’m very grateful.

So, next stop is Australia for the AUSOUG conference series…

Cheers

Tim…

Thursday OpenWorld Sessions…

Sessions:

Kevin Closson cancelled his session, which was a bummer, but life goes on.
Oracle Optimizer Roundtable: Some members of the optimizer team answered the audience questions.
Real-World Database Performance Roundtable: Members of this group answered questions from the audience on a variety of performance related subjects.

The roundtable sessions were pretty cool, but it feels a little like groundhog day sometimes. I think I could summarize much of the advice as follows:

Design your database properly.
Write good SQL. This is usually pretty easy if you have a good design.
Use default settings and functionality, unless you hit an issue that forces you not to. Even then, don’t assume you can not use the defaults for other projects. Work on an exception basis, not a one-size-fits all approach.
Newer versions of the database probably have features to eliminate or offset the problems seen in previous versions. If possible upgrade and make sure you understand the new features so you can apply them.

I don’t know about you, but this list has been true for as long as I’ve worked in Oracle. Unless you are working on systems requiring extreme performance or of extreme size, modern Oracle versions make life incredibly easy. It would be cool if people actually started taking the advice given by these guys every year…

Cheers

Tim…

Wednesday OpenWorld Sessions…

Wednesday was a slash and burn day for me. I woke up and decided I couldn’t cope with any more sessions so I ditched the lot. Some of the RAC ones looked really cool, but I just couldn’t drag myself out of the seat to go to them. Instead I went to the OTN lounge to chill out and chat to people. Lots of cool people, talking about technical and non-technical issues.

I ended up tagging along with some of the guys to a couple of discussion type unconference sessions, but generally it was a downtime day.

The “big” keynote kinda passed me by. There was nothing there that held much interest for me, either because I already knew about it, or just didn’t care. The Arnold thing was a little surreal, but celebrities will do anything for cash, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

In the evening I went to Treasure Island with some of the guys. I ticked a couple of boxes (Seen Aerosmith and Roger Daltry), then came home.

I feel a little guilty about being so apathetic about the day when others would give there right arm to be here, but OpenWorld started nearly a week ago for me, because of the ACE Directors meeting, so I was feeling really burnt out.

Cheers

Tim…

Queuing and Decoupling for Performance…

Some of the data warehousing and Exadata presentations have talked about queuing requests to improve performance. They have suggested that using Resource Manager to throttle the number of active requests results in better performance/throughput compared to letting multiple requests all run simultaneously. The Terabyte Hour session yesterday showed an example of this and sure enough, when they limited the heavy requests to batches of 3, the overall throughput of requests improved.

This kinda links to something I keep banging on about in my PL/SQL presentations, which is decoupling. Don’t do it, queue it…

In any system you have a variety of business functions that have differing importance and differing required turnaround time. It’s good if you can identify this up front so you can consider decoupling some business functions. That way, functions that MUST happen instantly are fired on the spot, while those that can accommodate some lag time are queued for later processing. The acceptable lag for each of these business functions may vary.

Why do I care? Two reasons really:

Why hog resources processing low priority tasks when they could be used for high priority tasks? You don’t run your backups and stats collection during peak hours. Why would you waste cycles on low priority business functions when the user experience is poor due to lack of resources.
Decoupling allows you to take small transactions and batch them up, allowing you to take advantage of performance features available in both SQL and PL/SQL.

Queuing and decoupling are by no means new concepts, but they seem to have been lost in the mix. It’s interesting to see them being brought back onto the agenda, even with the sort of horsepower provided by Exadata.

Cheers

Tim…