AUSOUG 3 ACEs Database Education Day – Perth 11th May 2009

Just a short note to say I’ll be presenting a 3 hour morning session on all things Oracle indexes at the 3 ACEs Database Education Day in Perth, Australia on 11th May 2009, presented by the Australian Oracle User Group.

Also presenting will be the rather clever Conner McDonald on an “Introduction To RAC” and the also equally rather clever Penny Cookson on “Bind Peeking – The Endless Tuning Nightmare”, so it should be a great day.

And the best news of all is that the event is free for all AUSOUG members with lunch provided. So for those of you lucky enough to get to Perth, follow the link above to book early and guarantee a place.

 

Also just want to quickly mention that I had the great pleasure of attending Tanel Poder’s “Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Seminar” in Melbourne last week.

It’s a great seminar that I highly recommend. Although it certainly covers some “advanced” topics, I would actually recommend the seminar to not just experienced DBAs as advertised, but really any DBA who is serious about diagnosing and troubleshooting database related problems. Because by far the most important message from the seminar is that rather than guessing and hoping a database problem might be this or that, rather that hoping increasing or changing this or that parameter might help, rather than crossing your fingers and praying that moving all indexes into a larger blocksize might improves things as it appeared to when you tried it once before, why not actually use database and O/S instrumentation to systematically, accurately and reliably determine exactly what the issue really is and so immediately go about applying a solution that will actually address the real problem. The earlier a DBA learns this basic principle rather than relying on outdated and ultimately inefficient and ineffective “hit and miss” checklists, the earlier one will ultimately become an efficient and effective DBA.

Why guess when you can know …

And Tanel’s seminar provides some great advice, suggestions and the odd script or two (actually many) to go about systematically determining what really is wrong with your database and why it’s causing performance issues (be it globally or to a specific user or group of users). Like I said, a highly recommended seminar and it was great to see I’m not the only one who struggles to get through everything in a seminar in the two days !!