Tag: #RedStackTeck

Tonight was Oracle Midlands Event #12 with Bryn Llewellyn  and Neil Chandler.

Bryn very kindly stepped in for Tom Freyer who unfortunately couldn’t make it. Bryn’s presentation was called Why use PL/SQL?, which was based on his whitepaper of the same name. I’ve written about a number of the topics he raised, including a piece on My Utopian Development Environment, but his talk and his whitepaper put forward a much more consistent and compelling argument. Definitely worth checking out if you are a PL/SQL expert or newbie!

Along the way, he used a little piece of syntax I have never noticed before, which has been available for the whole 20+ years I’ve been using PL/SQL. I’ll write about that in a post tomorrow if I get chance.

By the way, Bryn loves being called Brian, and he loves it when you say S.Q.L. and PL/S.Q.L. rather than Sequel and PL/Sequel. 🙂

Next up was Neil with a session called “Why has my plan changed?”. I’ve written about many of the issues discussed in this session, but Neil crystallised a whole array of points really well, and used live demos which I always like to see. Regardless of how well you think you know the subject, I would be surprised if you don’t walk away with a few new things, which you can later pretend you always knew. 🙂

Both guys will be presenting these sessions at UKOUG Tech15 if you want to catch up with them!

Thanks to the guys for coming to speak to us. Thanks to Bryn’s mom, for living in the UK, giving him an excuse to come to UKOUG Tech15 early and therefore be available to step in at short notice. Thanks as always to Red Stack Tech for sponsoring the event, allowing it to remain free, and to Mike for organising it!

Cheers

Tim…

Last night was Oracle Midlands event #11 with Chris Antognini.

The lead up to this event was not the best for me. I had been on the verge of a headache all day. By 14:00 I gave up, went home and went to sleep for a couple of hours. It wasn’t great, but it was just enough to take the edge off, so when the time came, I felt sort-of OK to head out for the event. The drive started to convince me this wasn’t the best move, but once I got to the event and sat down I figured I was going to make it. 🙂

Chris did two talks at the event.

• Designing for Performance: Database Related Worst Practices
• Identification of Performance Problems Without the Diagnostics Pack

The first talk had lots of people’s heads nodding. It’s kind-of depressing, but we’ve all seen, and continue to see, these same things happening again and again. I, like others in the audience, am convinced it is because of the lack of emphasis on database technologies in development. Too many frameworks encourage a hands-off approach to the database, hiding it behind persistence layers that end up doing a mediocre job, at best. Anyway, enough of my rambling. This session should be mandatory viewing once a month for every developer that goes near a database! 🙂

The second session was pretty neat too. I must admit I’ve become addicted to the Enterprise Manager 12c performance pages, so a couple of the things Chris mentioned took me by surprise, including the use of some V$ views that I assumed were part of the Diagnostics and Tuning Pack, but aren’t. I’m purposely going to avoid mentioning them here because I would want to confirm the status before accidentally leading someone astray, but the idea was, query the V$ view and you are good. Query the DBA_HIST_* view and you’ve sourced the information from the AWR, so you need the D&T pack. This definitely *does not* apply to all V$ views, but it’s worth checking out if you don’t have D&T, or you are working with standard edition.

I think the evening went really well. Thanks to Chris for coming to speak to us and thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for getting him across. Thanks to Red Stack Tech for sponsoring the event, allowing this to remain free. Thanks to Mike for doing a great job of keeping these events rolling. Of course, thanks to everyone for turning up after the Bank Holiday weekend. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…