Boneist's Oracle Blog

Opening Keynote – Mark Sunday

Before Mark came on, we had Debra Lilley and Lisa Dobson give a short talk about the changes in structure in the UKOUG organisation, which was interesting – I wasn’t aware that there’d been such big changes.

Mark came on and gave a talk about how fab Oracle was, and … well, that was my take-home message *{;-) I suspect I may not have been part of the ideal target audience!

SQL Tuning – Kyle Hailey

I’ve seen a couple of presentations in previous UKOUG conferences that were similar to what Kyle presented here – one by Jonathan Lewis on diagraming SQL statements and one by Wolfgang Breitling on tuning sql by cardinality. What I particularly liked about this one is that Kyle used a program to do the diagramming – it can be done by hand, but boy, do I now want that program! I’ll have to research it and see if I can navigate my work’s purchasing maze to get it, assuming we don’t already have it!

I also need to get Dan Tow’s book, which Kyle had based his talk upon.

Partitioning 101 – Connor McDonald

Yes, another entertaining Connor show! This time, all about partitions. I knew most of the pre-11g stuff, but not too much about the new 11g features (I’d heard about the new Interval partions, but not the rest). Connor took us through the different types of partitions and gotchas, tips etc. I shall definitely be revisiting partitions when we go to 11g!

Oracle Optimizer – Upgrading to Oracle Database 11g Without Pain – Maria Colgan The Optimizer Lady

Maria took us through the steps required to successfully upgrade to 11g with minimal pain due to the optimizer changes. A lot of this revolved around SQL Plan Baselines, which sound useful, but I’m not sure I fully “got” it, or how it could apply in our 11g migrations. Yet more things I’ll be adding into the “Things To Consider” pile for our migration!

With all the steps Maria was covering, I was beginning to panic about our migration, until right at the very end, someone asked a question of the rest of the audience: “Has anyone had a bad upgrade to 11g?” which got a tumbleweed! Someone replied and said it had gone smoothly for them, and another response was that they’d not heard of a bad upgrade, so that somehwat put my mind at rest!

Database I/O Performance Measuring and Planning – Alex Gorbachev

I suspect this was aimed mostly towards DBAs, but it sounded interesting, so I thought I’d go along anyway. Some of the technicalities went over my head, but it was useful – I can at least raise the discussion of I/O capacity planning with my DBAs and at least have some vague understanding of what I’m talking about! *{:-)

Performance and Stability with Oracle 11g SQL Plan Management – Doug Burns

Doug went into SQL Plan Management a bit more in depth than Maria – whom he insisted on calling “The Optimizer Lady” throughout his talk! – did, but it wasn’t too indepth, which was perfect for the time of day (being the last presentation before the final keynote of the (very long and full) day, and also served as excellent consolidation for Maria’s earlier presentation.