Oracle OpenWorld Day 3 Highlights

 

Started Day 3 waking up at 3am and staying awake until San Francisco decided to slowly light up. I have a feeling this summary will be a little briefer than previously …

First up was my Unconference Q & A session at Parc 55 Hotel. Considering the overall “Javaness” of the venue and location, I was actually surprised as many as 20-30 people managed to find out it was on. From my perspective, it was another success with quite a number of different questions asked and various subjects discussed including the workings of bitmap indexes and why they’re not suitable for OLTP applications, the appropriate ordering of composite index columns, index compression, usage of function-based indexes, impact of deletes and the setting of null values to index enries, to name but a few. Hopefully those who attended found it a useful session as Jarneil did.

Next up I popped into Kevin Closson’s session on “Do It Yourself Exadata”. Now I not the most “hardware savvy” of folks, but Kevin is both extremely knowledgable and passionate in his presentations which is a very useful combination of attributes to have as a presenter. I enjoyed his session very much and left with an appreciation of the various technical issues involved in trying to build an Exadata like environment, how it’s possible but perhaps not particularly practical.

I then enjoyed a lunch session out in the beautiful San Francisco sun, admiring many of the nearly buildings, attempting to get all my yawns out of my system (somewhat unsuccessfully).

I then had another quick walk around the exhibition hall where I met and had a chat with Guy Harrison, who kindly gave me a personally signed copy of his latest book. (Note to self: after all the goodies I’ve been collecting, be prepared for a very heavy suitcase on the flight back to Australia !!). A tip for anyone interested in going to OpenWorld in the future. Practice your golf putting skills for a few weeks beforehand as it will immeasurably increase one’s odds in winning a prize at the exhibition hall 😉

I then attended Greg Rahn’s Oracle Database Performance Secrets Finally Revealed session. It was excellent and covered very well an approach that really every DBA should be adopting when determining the actual cause and best solution to a performance related issue. No silly silver bullets here but a case of why why why why why (the 5 questions that a DBA should be asking in order to determine the actual root cause of an issue so that the actual and appropriate actions can be taken). No guess-work, no endlessly trying out different things hoping it might make a difference …

I decided initially to attend a session on the internals of the CBO run by Maria Clogan (who is again a great speaker) and various things that can go wrong but although excellent, I kinda knew all the material so decided instead to leave and pop into a presentation on how to deploy new database features risk free with Database Replay, a new 11g feature I’m looking at using back at work. Bad move !! It was all bland talk followed by an unbelievably long and totally unrelated vendor video on how to make solar panels, followed by a totally irrelevant discussion on just how great Exadata is with barely a mention of database replay, how it was deployed, how it helped, how it was applied, nothing of any practical benefit. In short, a total waste of time, unless you’re interested in solar panels of course.

It was then time for a beer or two back at the OTN tent to share the love and joy that was the “Java Posse”. I kinda get the strong impression that not all Java folks are overly thrilled at sharing the JavaOne conference with OpenWorld and Oracle Develop. Still, the Java song was rather catchy, Java Java Java, jing jing jing !! The networking side of things and meeting people is probably the most important aspect of conferences such as these and it’s always good to make new friends, catch up with old ones and finally put faces to people I’ve only previously met electronically.

A group of us then decided to go out to dinner at the nearby Mel’s Drive Diner and the “famous” Mel’s Burger although I’m not quite sure why it’s so famous to be honest. Despite attempts by Tim Hall to tell me just how many calories there were in the milkshakes, I did really enjoy one nonetheless !! A spot of shopping and an early night ends Day 3. Certainly hoping to sleep better tonight and not have nightmares of solar panels trying to burn me up alive …