OpenWorld Pictures…

I didn’t really take many photos in San Francisco, but here’s two shots I thought were worth posting…

First the DeLorean. Why didn’t Larry pack the Database Machine into one of these?

From OpenWorld

Next, a photo taken on Friday morning, after the conference was over. Believe it ot not, this was the road with the big marquee. Hard to imagine this road actually has traffic on it the rest of the year. 🙂

From OpenWorld

Cheers

Tim…

Whale watching in Freemantle…

I went whale watching in Freemantle today. I took a boat trip down the swan river from Perth to Freemantle, then got on a bigger boat and went out to sea. The water was really choppy, so about 25% of the people were really ill and many others were close. I haven’t found my land legs yet, so I was fine.

I wasn’t holding out much hope of seeing anything, but then we saw a Humpback whale jump. We moved towards it and it jumped again. Next we spotted a mother and calf. They were a bit more subdued, but we did see them come to the surface and there was a little bit of tail slapping. I didn’t get any photos or video of it, but I found this on YouTube which shows you what it looked like.

Finally, we saw a big whale in the distance repeatedly doing tail slaps. We moved closer, but then had to turn round and head back. I did video this, but I’m rubbish and it’s too embaressing to post it. 🙂

The rough sea made the boat trip feel like a rollercoater ride, which was fun. The fact that we actually saw the whales was totally cool.

Cheers

Tim…

Family and Friends post: Day 1 in Perth…

Hello family and friends…

The flight to perth took a little longer than the planned 7 hours and 45 minutes. The last 2 hours were really tough. The lack of sleep meant I was really irritable. Everything was aggrivating my skin and my legs felt really stiff and bloated. I got into the hotel at about 19:00 and by about 19:30 I was in bed. I think it had been something like 40 hours without sleep and about 21 hours in a plane. Not good karma.

This morning I feel much better. I even did a bit of Yoga. The cold has graduated to a full on cough, but at least I’ve got a week off flying. It’s a holiday in Perth today, so everything is shut down. I had a quick look round this morning, but I still feel a bit shakey so I’ve come back to the hotel. I’m gonna do my washing and go back to bed for a bit. 🙂

I’m thinking about taking a boat trip in the next couple of days. Stationary floors feel like they are shaking, so I hope a boat will feel a little more steady. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Magic Pixies…

I just checked the time in San Francisco and I understand why I’m on the verge of seeing Magic Pixies. It’s about 36 hours since I last slept. I’m about to board a flight that will take 7 hours and 45 minutes and get me to Perth at about 17:00. I really hope I pass out on the plane. I don’t care if I snore or dribble. I just checked out the symtoms of sleep deprevation. I’m so there dude!

Next stop visions of flames and voices in my head. I just hope the voice don’t try and persuade me to eat any animal prducts… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Tropic Thunder, Kungfu Panda and Deja Vu…

It’s difficult to understand how Tropic Thunder could possible become any more politically incorrect.

Ben Stiller plays a fading action star that tries to kickstart his serious acting career by playing “Simple Jack”, only to fail because he goes “full retard and you should never go full retard!”

Robert Downey Jr. plays an oscar winning method actor who undergoes a controversial skin pigmentation to play a black man in the film. Things go from bad to worse when he can’t get out of character.

Jack Black is an actor/junkie/bad boy in a franchise of films based totally around farting for laughs.

Brandon T. Jackson plays “Alpa Chino”, a rapper turned actor who endorses an energy drink called “Booty Sweat” and energy bars called “Busta Nut”.

You can’t imagine how painful it is watching Robert Downey Jr. “in character” talking to Brandon T. Jackson. It’s all so very wrong, which is why it works so well.

If you are easily offended stay well clear…

I watched Tropic Thunder in SF, but I’ve also seen a bunch of films on the plane, but I’m struggling to remember what… The hours kinda merge. I know I saw Kung Fu Panda, which was pretty cool. I also saw Deja Vu, which is a couple of years old, but it was quite good. I’ve seen at least two more, but I really can’t remember…

I’m sure this airport is built on a floating platform and the sea is really rough. I’m going to lie down on the floor again. Everything stops shaking then. The cleaners keep looking at me like I’m a tramp. You gotta laugh… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld 2008 Summary…

This is the 3rd OpenWorld I’ve attended and I think it was probably the most enjoyable for me so far.

The first year I was more than a little overwhelmed and intimidated by everything. The scale of the event is hard to imagine and being surrounded by people who are at the top of their game is quite daunting. I wouldn’t say I was suffering from hero worship, but I did get the odd “we are not worthy” moment.

The second year I had a bit of a “been there, done that” attitude and I don’t think I really appreciated it as much as I should have done.

This year I think I found my groove and relaxed into things. It’s really cool to reconnect with people from previous years and meet new people.

Massive thanks to Victoria Lira and Lillian Buziak who I bugged incessantly about my travel arrangements for this trip. You are both worth your weight in gold. Big thanks to Justin Kestelyn and the OTN crew for making sure everything ran smoothly.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Doug, perhaps next year you will be 3rd on the list…

Just landed in Auckland…

Just landed in Auckland. I left San Francisco 13 hours ago and it was 08:00 on Friday. It’s now 05:00 on Sunday. It’s something like 21 hours different, plus I flew overnight, plus the clocks just switched to summer time here. It’s like someone is trying, very successfully, to mess with my mind.

I’m going to be in the airport for 7+ hours waiting for for my flight to Perth. I was hoping to crash at a mates house while I waited, but he’s away for the weekend… 🙁

The lack of sleep, the planes and this pesky cold have all combined to leave me feeling like I’m on a ship. I can feel myself physically swaying. In a few hours I expect I’ll be blogging about being found sleeping in a toilet or something similar. I just hope I’ve got my clothes on. 🙂

That reminds me, someone fainted on the flight over here. She was walking along and just went out cold. Flat out on the floor for a couple of minutes. They brought an oxygen mask and everything. A few minutes later she was up and back at her seat. Falling over in a plane is bad karma. There are so many things to hit your head on!

Anyway, I’ve got to get some food and find a quiet toilet to sleep in… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Real World Performance, Exadata Storage & ACE Session…

Today was a very full day…

Real-World Database Performance Techniques and Methods
Real-World Database Performance Roundtable

I went to the primer session on Tuesday and both sessions today. I don’t think there was anything particularly new to me here, but listening to the experiences of a team like that helps you crystallize things in your mind. The three sessions were well presented and the last session, which was a Q&A session, through up a few interesting things.

Take-home messages in no particular order:

  • It all boils down to the SQL and the cardinality of the steps in the execution plan. If the optimizer gets the correct cardinality for each step it should make the correct decision. If it doesn’t it will make a bad decision. When you spot a problem SQL you need to find out why it make that bad decision.
  • Debug methodically. If only a fraction of your SQL performs badly, making global changes to the database is a very bad idea. Fix the problems, don’t tamper with the whole system.
  • You have to decide if your aim is to have predictable execution plans or to let execution plans evolve over time. Either choice comes with issues. To make plans predictable, use SQL Profiles, hints, check high/low values, avoid histograms and don’t be too quick to gather new stats. If you want plans to evolve, gather stats regularly and accept that plans will change over time. Identify poorly performing SQL when it arises and figure out why it is going wrong.
  • Tune 3rd party apps, and Oracle Apps the way the vendor recommends, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. Some applications are quite fussy and doing what you think is correct may be the wrong move.
  • Your aim should be to spread I/O evenly across all disks. ASM will do this for you.
  • In Oracle 11g, you should gather statistics with the auto sample size, unless you know of a specific reason not to. Don’t make random decisions on sample size.
  • The team always use 8K block sizes because that’s what the majority of the database testing is done against and what the majority of people use.
  • Partitioning: Global stats tend to give predictable execution plans, but that’s not always a good thing. Partition stats give a more accurate picture, but won’t always result in predictable execution plans. You have to decide which you want.
  • High/low values are important stats. Don’t default to extreme values that make high/low values unrepresentative as this affects the optimizer.

There’s a lot of information in the slides, so check them out when they come online. The main message is you should be methodical and consistent. Nothing new in that. 🙂

Oracle’s New Database Accelerator: Query Processing Revolutionized
Oracle’s New Database Accelerator: A Technical Overview

These two sessions were renamed to include the Exadata name. I didn’t record the new names, but I guess that will be obvious when you see the list of presentations.

Take-home messages:

  • The exadata storage server is also known as a storage cell.
  • You can buy the storage cells on their own and use them to build your own database system, or buy the preconfigured database machine.
  • The system is only supported on Linux at the moment, but other platforms will follow. I assume this means databases on other platforms plugging into the same Linux storage appliances.
  • The storage cells are single purpose. They are for holding database files only. If you want a shared filesystem for any other file types you need to use something else. So you guys who want to use it to store MP3s and pr0n better store it in BLOBs in the database. 🙂
  • The iDB protocol (like iSCSI) presents storage to ASM. No OS config (LUNs mount points) is necessary. At its simplest, you can consider each storage cell as a single disk when viewed from ASM.
  • Storage cells don’t talk to each other, only to the database. The cells are aware of the database state and the database knows about the cells because of ASM.
  • Multiple databases can use the same storage cell.
  • The storage is presented to the database as shared-everything, but it has elements of shared-nothing architecture. Because the presentation to the database is unchanged, it is suitable for use with any existing application without change.
  • There is an EM plugin and several tools, but for the most part it needs no management. It is essentially a storage appliance (their words), but it can do some clever stuff.
  • Because of the presentation of storage cells to ASM, adding new storage cells is like adding disks. It triggers an ASM rebalance.
  • Normal ASM mirroring (2 or 3-way) is present, but it makes sure it mirrors to different cells, not just different disks in a cell, so it can tolerate a disk or a cell failure.
  • The storage cells should not need a software upgrade to work with new versions of Oracle, but if new offload features require changes, you may be restricting the offload functionality by not upgrading the cell server software. This was likended to the ASM compatibility modes in 11g.
  • Resource management information is passed from the database to the storage cells so I/O is prioritized to match the database resource management.
  • When you offload processing to the storage cell, only the relevant column information is returned. As a result, this won’t be stored in the buffer cache, but it is possible to cache it in the SQL result cache.
  • Up to 6 of the prebuilt database machines can fit together by just cabling them. You only need to worry about extra infiniband switches if you want more than 6. I can see this being a big problem for me… Not! 🙂
  • It is designed for intensive query work, like warehouses. The performance of insert, update and delete operations is just like any other block storage device. That’s what the guy said, but I guess it was a glib statement. I would assume it is still faster than most storage devices due to the wicked network bandwidth.

This list represents many of the points made in the two talks, but I’ve started to read some of the stuff on Kevin Closson‘s blog, and the related links and it’s making me a bit nervous about my random ramblings. I’m going to leave this list here to remind me of what I heard, but you really need to check out the white papers.

There were some neat slides explaining the cell server software and the way the project evolved.

The biggest surprise to me was how few people were actually at these sessions. I blogged previously to say I was underwhelmed by the announcement, but I was still curious. It seems not many other people were. 🙁

After hearing a bit more about the kit I can see why some people are really excited by it. It is very clever, but I still think it is pretty irrelevant to grunt DBA/Developers like me. Of course, I reserve the right to get excited by it at a later date and back track on all my cynical rantings. When they are in the bargain section at PC World I will race to the shop to buy one, but until then I guess I’ll be stuck with crappy old disks. 🙂

Oracle ACE Director Birds-of-a-Feather Tips and Techniques Panel

This was my only real job at OpenWorld and I was pretty nervous going in to it. When you present a formal session you are talking about a specific area and you have an idea of what questions might come up. Sitting on a panel without access to Google and no time to compose your thoughts is a whole different ball game. Luckily the verbal diahorea gene that runs in my family was expressed in full effect and I managed to do more than my fair share of talking. Thanks to Lewis for setting this up. Thanks to the other guys on the panel for answering the questions that would have stumped this chump. Most of all thanks to the attendees for turning up and asking questions. I hope you got something out of it. 🙂

I think I’ll let the events of the last few days sink in, then write a summing up post tomorrow.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Keynote Aftermath…

I think I’m in the minority when I say I was a little underwhelmed by the keynote yesterday. I’m sure there are many positive points about Oracle Exadata Storage and HP Oracle Database Machine, but it all seems a little irrelevant to me. I hear what Kevin Closson is saying and it sounds cool, but for me this is like discussing the merrits of a Lamborghini when I’m actually going to buy a Renault Clio.

I guess only time will tell how this will affect a grunt DBA/Developer like myself…

Cheers

Tim…

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