Home › Tag Archives › review

UKOUG 2011 – Social stuff

I go to the UKOUG conferences to learn stuff from the presentations, but I also go to meet people. If I didn’t really know anyone, I wouldn’t go! (As evidenced by the fact that I didn’t go until 2 years ago, which was not long after I’d met Doug Burns and let him talk me into going! Doug knows *everyone*, I swear!).

Here are the Social highlights of this year’s conference for me (I could detail every meeting, but even I would get bored of reading all that! Needless to say, everyone I met was brilliant, and the discussions etc that we had were entertaining.):

People I met/met up with during the conference (in no particular order!):

  • David (@Farkough on Twitter), who is an old friend (and fellow spod!(*))
  • Martin Widlake (@MDWidlake on Twitter). A fellow Oracle London Beer conspiritor
  • Neil Chandler (@ChandlerDBA on Twitter). A fellow Oracle London Beer conspiritor
  • Doug Burns (@orcldoug on Twitter). Yet another fellow Oracle London Beer conspiritor (they get around, right?!)
  • David Kurtz (@davidmkurtz on Twitter).
  • Niall Litchfield (@nlitchfield on Twitter). An occasional Oracle London Beer attendee
  • Patrick Hurley (@phurley on Twitter).
  • Piet de Visser (@pdevisser on Twitter).
  • Tony Sleight (? I think that was his surname!)
  • “Big” Dave Roberts (blog).
  • Karen, Tony, Kalyan, and Aftab (? I think I’ve probably got the wrong name here; hope somebody will correct me!) – ex-colleagues of Martin Widlake’s.
  • Jonathan Lewis (blog). Another occasional Oracle London Beer attendee.
  • Connor McDonald (@connor_mc_d on Twitter).
  • Kyle Hailey (@dboptimizer on Twitter).
  • Marco Gralike (@MGralike on Twitter).
  • Alex Gorbachev (@alexgorbachev on Twitter).
  • Debra Lilley (@debralilley on Twitter).
  • Lisa Dobson (@lj_dobson on Twitter).
  • Alex Nuijten (@alexnuijten on Twitter).
  • Tim Hall (@oraclebase on Twitter).
  • Ben Burrell, aka Munky (@munkyben on Twitter).
  • Martin Bach (@MartinDBA on Twitter).

(If I’ve forgotten to add anyone, it’ll be my shoddy memory, and not down to them!)

Highlights

  • Going out for a meal on the Monday night with David (@Farkough), Martin W and Neil, and having a laugh
  • Going on to the Tap and Spile following the focus pubs on the Monday night with Niall, Martin, Neil, Dave R and Tony, with Munky popping his head in occasionally. I shall never look at carrots in the same way again!
  • Going out for a meal on the Tuesday night with Martin W, Dave R and Martin W’s ex-colleagues, then heading off to the masked ball, and bumping into Connor, Kyle, Doug, Niall and Tony amongst others
  • Ending up at the Jury’s bar until the wee small hours of Monday evening, and talking lots of random stuff with various people, including particle physics, and also getting told off by Marco about my shoddy XML db design *{;-)
  • The Oak Talks, whilst not strictly a social thing, were fun and entertaining. I hope they have them again next year!

(*) We’re both members of the same BBS: http://www.mono.org/ – still accessible via telnet!)

UKOUG2011 – Day 3 (Wednesday)

After a late night (um, < 4 hours sleep...) I was up bright and... well, just early now I come to think of it! I checked out, retrieved the coat (phew!) I hadn't realised I'd left in the hotel bar until just before I was about to leave the hotel room for the final time and had breakfast. Then it was off to the first presentation of the day... Statistics On Partitioned Objects – Doug Burns

I have a feeling that I’ve seen this presentation before – it’s possible that I haven’t seen the entire presentation, but I believe Doug did a couple of work presentations around this subject. Anyway, whether it was those or his blog entries on the subject, a lot of it felt familiar. Doug is an engaging speaker, and the subject is an interesting one. I’m not sure whether it’s applicable to the way our databases are designed, but I will be recalling this talk (amongst others) when I think of ways to improve our stats gathering when we go to 11g.

Using GoldenGate To Minimize Database Upgrade Risk – Marc Fielding

I didn’t fully understand what this talk was going to be about when I signed up for it, but having just worked with and upgraded GoldenGate following a bug in the version we use, plus the upcoming 11g upgrade, I thought it would be a good thing to go to.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s applicable in our situation this time, but it was about using GoldenGate to copy the data changes from a, for example, 10g database up to the same db but in 11g. Potentially very useful, so a good idea to have in the back of my mind, should I ever come across a situation where it could be used.

The talk was aimed more at DBAs than devs, I think, but I was pleased that I understood most of the GG terms he used – our recent issues at least consolidated my GG knowledge, so it wasn’t all bad!

Optimizer Statistics – A Fresh Approach – Connor McDonald

Yes, the keener eyed/memoried amongst you will spot that I attended this on Sunday. Well, I did have another session lined up to go to, but by this time, my brain couldn’t handle much! Connor was just as amazing as he was on Sunday (no surprise there, then!), and I was able to just sit back and be entertained! (Thanks Connor!)

Faster, Leaner, More Efficient Databases – Index Organised Tables – Martin Widlake

Martin has done a series of blog entries on IOTs and this proved to be an interesting talk. I’ve used IOTs in the past, and will perhaps again, now that our version of GG has gone up to the latest version (the version we had previously couldn’t handle IOTs; I’m not sure about the new version, but I’d hope it would!).

The performance stuff was especially interesting, so I’ll have to go away and see how it might be applied in our databases. A good talk to have gone to.

What Shape Is Your Data? – Niall Litchfield

This was the last talk of the conference, and it was interesting. Niall took us through some examples of how data might be organised and what can be done to best optimize it.

Truth be told, I was flagging a little by this point, so didn’t retain as much of the talk as I’d have liked – I’ll definitely be downloading the slides, when they appear!!

UKOUG2011 – Day 2 (Tuesday)

So, Tuesday dawned bright and … er, well I didn’t go in for the first session of the day (not that I’d found one I wanted to go in for anyway, so nothing lost there!) but I was definitely there for the second session!

Who’s Afraid Of Analytic Functions? – Alex Nuijten

Alex is someone I’ve known from the OTN SQL & PL/SQL forum for quite some time now, although I’ve only met him in person a couple of times now. He’s a massive proponent of analytic functions (as am I – seriously, they *rock*!) and I couldn’t miss his analytics talk. Sorry Niall – I would have loved to have gone to yours too, but this just pipped yours!

This was one of the few that I came out of thinking that maybe I wasn’t actually so dumb after all! As with everything, there are lots of ways of doing the same thing, and although I’m fairly comfortable with analytic functions, there are still ways that I approach things that aren’t the most efficient. Some of Alex’s examples highlighted that for me!

If you aren’t familiar or comfortable with analytic functions yet, I would highly recommend you go see one of Alex’s talks on the subject!

A Year In Purgatory – Diary Of An 11.2 Upgrade – Connor McDonald

This was a presentation that very nearly wasn’t given! Debra Lilley had seen it when Connor did it in Perth, and was determined to get him to do it at UKOUG. Given that he’d already used up both slots for other presentations, this one was going to be saved for next year but, due to someone else having to pull out at the last minute, Debra got her wish!

All I can say about this is poor, poor Connor and his team (I assume there was a team?!). He took us through all the mishaps that occured in the past year or so when upgrading to an 11g Rac environment. As per his normal presentation style there was plenty of humour and entertainment, but I’m amazed that he’s got any hair left after the nightmare he described!

Troubleshooting The Most Complex Oracle Performance Problem I’ve Ever Seen – Tanel Poder

This was an intersting talk in that for most of it, I was scratching my head as to why it was an Oracle problem! It turned out to be a problem that Doug Burns had encountered (sorry, no spoilers here!), and whilst I basically followed things, I think it was more aimed at a DBA than someone like me. Still, it’s interesting to pick up little tips and tricks on the O/S side of things. And of course, the more I know about the underneath areas of Oracle, the easier it is to talk to my DBAs!

It’s All In The Index – Michael Salt

Poor Michael only just made his presentation, by the sounds of it – massive train problems! However, he made it and produced a useful talk on indexes and how they can be used to improve the performance of poorly running SQL statements.

I didn’t always agree with what Michael said (add an index to aid queries on tables where the data is stored in the wrong datatype? Fix the table/data, not mitigate the symptoms! Meanwhile, back in the real world, I know that’s not always possible!), but he did throw up an interesting off-the-cuff remark that completely stopped me in my tracks! I’ll be blogging on this shortly!

Beating The Oracle Optimizer – Jonathan Lewis

This was a tour of how to optimise a two-table query in 7 different ways – some of which I would never have come up with in a million years! An excellent presentation, as always.

This also happened to be the one that Jonathan asked me to be his alarm clock! I was so worried about missing the 10min / 5min warnings that he’d requested, I was checking the time every other minute or so throughout his presentation… only for him to finish 3 minutes before I was due to give him his 10 minute warning! By this time, I was panicking that the time on both my watch and my mobile phone was wrong or something, whereas Jonathan had apparently been thinking that I’d be waving at him any second for quite a while! Hehehe; I got all worked up for no reason!

Challenges And Chances Of The 11g Query Optimizer – Christian Antognini

This was a bit of a whistlestop tour through the 11g Query Optimizer changes and what we could expect to see once we’ve upgraded to 11g. Some of these I’d already seen covered in earlier presentations, such as SQL Plan Management, but others I was completely unaware of! A useful session to go to if, like me, you’re contemplating upgrading to 11g.

UKOUG2011 – Day 1 (Monday)

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.

UKOUG2011 – Day 0 (Oak Table Sunday)

First, a note about how I’m going to write up this year’s UKOUG Conference. There was a looooot happening this conference, both socially and learning-wise, so I’m going to break things up – first, I’ll write up my thoughts on the presentations (over several blog entries!) and then I’ll write up my networking/social/fun thoughts.

So anyway, this year, UKOUG and the Oak Table guys got together and put on an extra day’s worth of sessions (which were repeated later on in the conference). Despite National Express East Anglia/Network Rail’s best efforts (Cambridge train station was closed!) I managed to get to Birmingham in time for the start of OakTable Sunday – mainly due to the fact that my other half very kindly drove me to Milton Keynes so that I could catch the train from there! This had the bonus side effect of me not having to get up early enough to catch the coach from Cambridge station at 5:50am!

Anyway, on with the presentation write-ups:

Tales From The OakTable – Mogens Nørgaard

I’ve never seen Mogens before, though I’ve heard plenty about him, and it was somewhat of a shock! He was incredibly laid back, and started off by saying that we were probably not going to learn anything over the conference, or at most, about 5% would stick with us after the conference.

He treated us to a few stories about the OakTable and its members, encouraging stories from Oakies in the audience too. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this, really, as it was a very strange talk! Perhaps if I’d seen Mogens present before, then it wouldn’t have been a surprise!

About Multiblock Reads – Frits Hoogland

This was about the changes to multiblock reads in 11g, and how you cannot rely on scattered reads anymore – sometimes it will choose to do direct path reads, which means that you lose the advantages of query results being cached. This could be a good thing or not, but it was something I was unaware of (even though Doug has apparently already blogged about it!). Given that we will hopefully be migrating our 10g databases to 11g next year, I’m very glad I went to this session!

Optimizer Statistics – A Fresh Approach – Connor McDonald

Having seen Connor present at the 2009 UKOUG conference, I was determined that I was going to see as many of his presentations as I could. Thankfully, he presents on topics that are relevant to me, but even if he didn’t, I’d go along and see him in action! Honestly, if you’ve never seen him present, if you should ever get the chance to do so, do! He is *a* *maze* *ing!

Connor talked about statisics, both object and database stats, such as how you should gather stats, etc. There were some ideas in there that I’d never considered before (pending stats), but I’ll definitely go back to work and think about our stats strategies etc!

Statistics Gathering and Histograms – DOs and DON’Ts – Wolfgang Breitling

Following on from Connor’s presentation was Wolfgang’s. He went into more detail on histograms and was of the same opinion as Connor – don’t use histograms if you don’t need to; set them explicitly. Another talk I shall consider when looking at our stats gathering!

Performance and High Availablility Panel Session

Finally, the OakTable Sunday was topped off by a panel session of various OakTable members who took questions from the audience and wanted to know about the longest prod outage that people were brave enough to own up to! Thankfully, I’ve never caused a prod outage, but someone had had an overnight outage and someone else had had 18 hours although I don’t think it was caused by them. Connor won on the monetary outage front – he managed to hose a 10 million Aussie dollar truck through a bit of dodgy code!

UKOUG Tech and EBS Conference – what have I learnt for next time?

So, UKOUG Tech and EBS 2009 Conference was the first conference I’ve ever been to. I headed out to it full of nerves over whether I’d get lost, have the right materials to take notes with, etc, so I thought I’d write a list of things I’d do differently next year. It may come in handy for next year’s first-timers, who knows?!

So, for my next UKOUG conference, I will:

  • make plans as to when to meet up with people I know, if they’re also going to be attending, especially for lunch and in the evenings
  • compare agendas with said people
  • talk to my optician re. what I can do to make it easier to see the slides; different glasses just for the long distance viewing, maybe?
  • make sure I have plenty of ibuprofen and paracetamol at hand, just in case!
  • pick up the conference goody-bag prior to my first presentation – do this by making sure you go round the entire exhibition hall, as this time, they were handed out at the very back!
  • not worry about having to buy a separate notebook; one is included in the conference goody-bag
  • try not to fill every available slot with a presentation; it will be information overload!
  • try to get enough sleep!
  • be prepared to be overwhelmed and try to take it in step when that happens
  • make much more effort to overcome my shyness and *talk* to more people, and especially the people I have talked to online that I really want to say hi to!

Things that I already did which turned out to be really good ideas:

  • wear comfortable shoes
  • read (and comment on!) lots of blogs throughout the year from different people (to a) gain a wider perspective and b) get familiar with the wider Oracle community)
  • become friends with someone who has been to previous conferences and knows a few of the regular attendees
  • come prepared to learn
  • follow the signs to the halls and pay attention to the most excellent and helpful ICC staff!
  • explore the area before the conference starts
  • Twitter like mad and use the appropriate hash tags! This is a useful means of introducing yourself to other conference attendees and also the wider Oracle community *{;-)
  • work out what sessions you’re going to attend prior to the conference start; having a plan of action for the day in advance helps a lot!
  • be prepared to enjoy yourself!

All in all, I had a great time and I learnt a lot. I also met lots of people that I’d never dreamed I would actually meet, and hopefully have begun broadening my network of contacts!

I would wholly recommend attending the UKOUG Tech and EBS Conference, and would happily go again next year, I get the opportunity to go again!

UKOUG Tech and EBS Conference – the writeup, part 3! (Wednesday)

Wednesday – #ukoug_tebs Day 3
So, what with Tuesday evening’s shennanigans, I decided to give the first presentation of Wednesday (Joze Senegacnik’s “Execution Plan Stability in Oracle 11g”) a miss, and get more of a lie in. As I had packed before bed, there wasn’t much to do after I’d got up (there was method to my madness after all!), so more time in bed! *{;-)

Randolf Geist – Everything you always wanted to knw about FIRST_ROWS_N but were afraid to ask
Randolf is another person that I know and respect from the OTN SQL and PL/SQL forum, and I had been looking forward to attending this presentation ever since I’d booked to come to the conference.

I’ve never really used the ALL/FIRST_ROWS hint before, although obviously I knew about their existence beforehand; I’ve never needed to do Top-N or pagination queries before, and ALL_ROWS (the default) has always been sufficient for me, especially since I’ve usually needed… all the rows!

Randolf stated right at the beginning that he’d intended to reveal everything about how the ALL_ROWS_N hint/optimizer mode worked, but that he’d had problems with the results, which caused problems with his theories. I thought this was a fairly odd way to start the presentation, but after a while, it became clear that this was still clearly an area that Randolf was still experimenting with, to fine tune his theories.

I found it a fascinating insight into how one might go about working out what the database internals are actually doing, as well as learning more about the ALL_ROWS_N hint/mode. I did want to go over to introduce myself afterwards but unfortunately someone else had already had a similar idea, and I didn’t like to barge in. I should’ve gone up and stood waiting (hind-sight, oh how you’re 20-20!); how much does it cost to just say “Hi, I’m Boneist from the forums, just wanted to say ‘hi’ and great presentation!”?! D’oh. Next time, definitely.

Rob van Wijk – All about grouping
Poor Rob had developed a cold by the time he came to present *{:-( However, he managed not to sniffle at all (impressive!) despite sounding more and more full of cold as the presentation went on! My heart went out to him and I kept wanting to hand him a tissue, just in case he needed one!

The presentation was informative, and I’ve picked up a lot about how the grouping sets, cubes and rollups work as well as how they interact. Sounds like the optimizer still has a way to go on working out ways to identify cubes, given a mix of grouping sets, rollups etc. This was one of the presentations I was really looking forwards to, as I had always been confused about the extended grouping stuff. However, work wanted me to see if it was possible to do stuff in “my” database that currently gets done in another one further downstream in the lifecycle of our data, so I’d had to work out myself what the grouping sets, rollups etc is about. So, I knew a bit more about them than when I had originally booked to come to the conference.

The presentation clarified things for me, and I now feel confident in knowing how to use and manipulate grouping sets/rollups/cubes etc to try and get best performance out of them. Thanks Rob!

Again, Rob had people talking to him at the end of his presentation, so I left without talking to him *{:-( Still, at least we had met, so that wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been, but even so…

Wolfgang Breitling – Anatomy of a SQL Tuning session
I actually met Wolfgang at the Fire party on the Tuesday night, and he seemed like a really nice, down-to-earth kinda guy, although perhaps a little insulted that I’d only managed to skim read the paper of his that Doug had sent me a link to! (I didn’t have time to read it fully, but skim read it so I at least know to go should I need to use that information!) I’m not sure I managed to dig myself out of that particular hole, though. *{;-) I’d had this session in my agenda for a long while, so I wasn’t attending it just to make it up for my boo-boo of the previous night!

It took me a little while to click that we were taking a SQL statement that he had tuned and were going to run through what steps he had done (um, I blame my stupid headache for that!), but once it had, I sat back and enjoyed his demonstration. Feedback by cardinality; which sort of ties back to what Jonathan Lewis did in his presentation on Monday (“Writing Optimal SQL”) – I think a combination of using pictures to diagram the query plus this feedback by cardinality is a good place to start when trying to tune SQL statements; I shall certainly be using both methods to try and do that from now on.

I really enjoyed the session, even though the last step Wolfgang did was to use quite a specific set of hints to force the behaviour he wanted! Whilst I know that some hints are good if you know more about the data than the optimizer does (eg all_rows), I disagree with trying to force production code down one particular path, based on information that’s “correct” as of today – I think all that does is postpone the problem until tomorrow/next month/next year (delete as applicable).

However, I do understand the limits we all have to work under (upset users, irate managers, no time for investiaging proper fixes, etc, etc) and I guess hints really are the quick fix, albeit likely temporary!

The End
And that – as they say – is all, folks! The end of the conference!

I headed off back home, sad that it was all over, but glad to be going home and meeting up with my partner. Less happy to be heading back to work the following day, it has to be said! My 6am alarm was rather more of a shock than normal!

UKOUG Tech and EBS Conference – the writeup, part 2! (Tuesday)

Tuesday – #ukoug_tebs Day 2
Despite having promised myself an early night on the Monday night, it was quite late when I finally went to sleep, so I decided that I would give Bob Mycroft’s “Getting connected!” a miss and take advantage of a bit of a lie in, although in the end, I didn’t lie-in for long!

Tom Kyte – All about metadata; why telling the database about your schema matters
I found myself nodding a lot to what Tom was saying, as well as despairing at the 3rd party database we have <whisper>that doesn’t have any foreign keys</whisper>. Most of this presentation was reinforcing things that I’d hope most if not all database designers/developers/dba should already know, but I know from experience on the OTN SQL and PL/SQL forum that people consistently use the wrong datatypes (particularly dates; people seem to hate using the DATE datatype for some reason!).

One thing that was mostly new was the Dimensions thing. Whilst I do vaguely touch a snowflake schema in one of my databases, it really isn’t a datawarehouse, so I haven’t really needed to dig all that deeply into tuning it. But I now understand the Dimensions constraint thing better than I did, and it’s now there in my mental toolbox *{:-)

Connor McDonald – 11g features for Developers
Wow! This was incredibly faced paced and packed with humour! I’ve no idea how he managed it, given that he was also jetlagged! I really enjoyed this presentation, even though Connor thought it wasn’t all that great (?!?!), and I had trouble writing everything down in my notes, there was so much stuff!

Lots of things that I wasn’t aware of in 11g that sound like they’ll come in useful (eg. error logging in scripts; now that does sound useful… plus he mentioned 10g there, so I shall investigate when I get a moment!) and some that I already knew about (eg. virtual columns). Good stuff!

I’d definitely go watch Connor present again, even if it was in a subject area I had no interest in; he was amazing!

Afterwards, when I came out of the presentation, Rob van Wijk introduced himself to me, so I can at least say that I did meet one of the people I had really, really wanted to meet at UKOUG, albeit that I was a bit shellshocked from both presentations of the morning so wasn’t exactly at my best *{:-( I didn’t talk to him for as long as I would have liked, but I now have a face to go along with the name! (Rob is one of the people on the OTN SQL and PL/SQL forum that I have huge respect for and he always gives well thought-out answers and explanations. I am kicking myself that I didn’t chat longer with him *{:-( )

another pause in the proceedings
I was meant to be going to Jonathan Lewis’ “Introducing Partitions” but I gave this a miss, due to feeling information overloaded and also my eyes needed a break. So I headed to the lounge and pootled around for a while, having lunch etc, until the next presentation.

Julian Dyke – Vital Statistics
I have to say, I was disappointed by this presentation. I’d heard that Julian was a pretty good presenter, and I went along, expecting to learn a lot more about statistics than I already knew.

Unfortunately, what I got was something that more or less walked through the documentation, something that I have already done for myself. I was hoping for something that extended what the documents said and gave it context and meaning, but that was sadly lacking. Perhaps my fault for not having read the abstract clearly enough.

I did learn one thing, though, so not a total waste of time – copy stats. How on earth I’ve missed this procedure is anyone’s guess, but it will make copying stats from one partition to another easier than what I do at the moment (export the stats, faff around changing things in the stats table, reimport the stats to the intended partition)!

Chris Dunscombe – RAC – What’s the difference?
This was my last presentation of the day, and I was in two minds as to whether to stay for it or not, as I knew it was oriented towards DBAs, which I am most assuredly not *{;-) There was nothing else I wanted to see, and I had picked this one because it sounded like it might give me a basic idea of what’s involved in setting up RAC, should I ever become involved with working with RAC databases. In the end, I decided to stay (and no, the offer of chocolate that Chris gave us was not really an incentive for me to stay *{;-) ).

All I can say is, wow! I’m *so* glad I’m not a DBA; there’s a lot of server and storage considerations etc, and really, my brain is not geared for that territory! Still, I was glad that I stayed for this, as it did give me an overview of the kinds of things that would need to be thought about, and will allow me to help give the DBAs the right kinds of information if I’m ever involved in setting one up (from a development point of view, obviously!)

It was a good presentation – Chris managed to get people interacting, providing information etc which is not bad for that time of the day! I liked that Chris was able to take new ideas on board and run with that right in the middle of his presentation!

The Fire and Ice parties
So, after briefly (and I do mean that!) heading in to the meet the speakers bit and not seeing anyone I could talk to (only recognised Jonathan Lewis, and I really didn’t feel like I could just barge up and say “Hi! I think you’re fab!” when he was already in the middle of talking to someone else…) I went and hid for a while. I popped my head round the doors for the ice party, didn’t see anyone (again other than JL) that I recognised, felt sorry for the ladies stuck in the middle of tables, dressed up like loo roll covers and headed off to the fire party.

This had scalextric, pool tables, table football and random jugglers (who were *amazing*… I can just about manage 3 balls in a basic pattern for about 30 seconds, but they were making the balls do incredible things and just kept on going!), and after having a drink and wandering round watching people playing, I gave up and headed out into the foyer bit for the internet suite.

They had notebooks or whatever they’re called, and my goodness the writing was tiny! I ended up hunched over and peering at the screen (must have looked really odd!) just to be able to read the screen properly! Anyway, just before I was going to call it a day (it was cold in the foyer, brrr!), Doug showed up after having had a snooze. So I stuck like a limpet to his side for the rest of the evening and managed to meet and chat to loooooads of people! At one point, I was in a pub surrounded by all these big names of the Oracle community! Little ol’ *me*?!?!

Highlights were doing a spot of not-being-able-to-find-one-good-thing-to-say about a certain someone with a whole crowd of people, talking to Chris Dunscombe re. his presentation and how I got loads out of it (along with other things), meeting Alex Gorbachev after having bantered with him over Twitter and oooh, just about everything, actually!!

I bowed out of the pub early (at 1.15am?!) and headed back to my hotel, where I realised I needed to pack. Ended up procrastinating and didn’t go to sleep until about 2.30am! Whoops…

UKOUG Tech and EBS Conference – the writeup, part 1!

Sunday – arrival in Birmingham
After visiting the not-quite-in-laws for the weekend (and helping out – in the kitchen – at this year’s Shrewsbury Model Railway exhibition that my Great-Uncle Jeff started over 25 years ago. Sadly he died earlier this year, and so this year’s event was held in his memory), I arrived in Birmingham.

Driving in Birmingham is as bad as driving in Leeds! Thankfully, my other half was driving, but even so, the exits to take weren’t clear on the sat nav until, typically, we’d gone past! Thankfully, we only missed one junction, but there were some hairy moments as we tried to work out which lane we should be in, etc! T’other ‘alf deserves a medal! Anyway, once I’d been dropped off at the hotel, I decided to go exploing.

The hotel I stayed at (Copthorne; would recommend – very handy for food, German market and the ICC!) was very central; I discovered a cut through and ended up just outside the Paradise Forum. Intending to find
the ICC first, I decided to go through the, um, “forum” and when I got to the other side, the German market … distracted me somewhat! So, with some Chrstmas shopping done, I decided to give up my quest for things, and decided I’d check my iPhone to see if I could navigate myself to the ICC. I eventually got there, but the long way round (typical!) – it turned out that if I’d headed away from the “forum” towards the giant lit-up Ferris wheel, I’d have soon found the ICC!

Once I was happy with knowing where to go in the ICC, I headed back to the hotel and, along the way, found yet more German market stalls (including one with puzzles… I ended up buying 4!).

Monday – #ukoug_tebs Day 1

I made sure I got to the ICC in plenty of time to register before the First Timer’s Briefing, and whilst waiting for that to start, I went round the exhibition. I was too shy to actually stop and talk to people, plus I hate being pestered by random sales guys when I’m just browsing, so having not found anything that I felt I could legitimately talk about with the vendors, I just wandered past each stall quickly! *{;-)

First Timer’s Briefing
The first timer’s briefing was ok; telling us about the ICC, the staff, wear comfortable shoes, etc, etc and mentioned the free bag with agenda guide and other goodies that I’d somehow missed from the exhibition hall! So, when the session finished early, I headed straight back to pick up my bag before heading off to my first ever conference session – the keynote by David Callaghan.

David Callaghan Keynote
This was in hall 1 (biiiiiig lecture theatre stylee) and was quite full. We had a talk by the UKOUG chairman, Ronan, and someone whose name I forget (sorry, sorry) – Deborah, I think?. This was quite entertaining and light-hearted and went on for about 20 mins or so, before David was introduced.

David talked for a while about how the recession was affecting things, etc, and (should I really admit this?) I found it a bit dry and boring, and despite trying to listen, kept finding myself drifting off onto other thoughts (what’ll I have for dinner? when’s Tom going to appear? etc etc). I never have been too good at wading through all the marketing spiel *{;-) Aaaanyway, Ronan came back on after David had finished and there was a bit more banter, before Tom Kyte was introduced.

Tom Kyte Keynote – What are we still doing wrong?
Unfortunately, there was no break between the end of the keynote and Tom’s session, so people were forced to just get up and leave whilst Tom was standing at the podium. A bit distracting for him, I’m sure, although I know that Ronan has already taken this on board and I’m sure it’ll be done differently next time! Tom’s session was about things that we as developers are still doing wrong – it was thoroughly entertaining and useful (and yes, I had a few guilty winces…).

I could have sat and listened to Tom talk for longer, and indeed, it seemed like he had more to say, but unfortunately ran out of time. The only negative thing I would say about Tom’s presentation is that there was too much RED in the slides; it made my eyes hurt! (And, to be honest, my eyes were struggling with seeing the slides, even though I was fairly close to the front!).

pause in the procedings
I’d had a bit of a headache (which I don’t normally get!) on the Sunday, and by this point in the proceedings, it had returned and I wasn’t feeling brilliant. My eyes had struggled with the slides, and I don’t think it was a problem with the projecters or the screens, either. I’m long-sighted, amongst other things, but I struggle to focus at distances. My prescription could be improved for long distance vision, but this would reduce my near distance vision. Given that I need to be close to the things that I’m looking at when I read, sew, write, etc, and that I do more of this than I do staring at presentations on large screens, it’s a compromise I’ve had to make. Didn’t help my headfail though!

I was going to go to Carl Dudley’s “Constraints – for complex business rules and improved performance” presentation, but decided that I really, really needed to give my eyes a break, so I ended up wandering through the exhibition again, before flumping in the lounge area.

Graham Wood – The ASHes of time?
I went to this primarily because Doug has previously mentioned about ASH both as part of his “How I learned to love pictures” presentation, and separately when we were discussing a performance issue I was having, and it sounded like it would be a good session to learn more about it from an introductory level. And it was!

I picked up some useful tips and information from this, that when I finally persuade my team’s DBA’s to reset our Grid Control password, will come in very handy! And, of course, if I query the table myself! *{:-D

Jonathan Lewis – Writing Optimal SQL
By now, I was really struggling, as my head really was becoming fuzzy and painful, so I took some ibuprofen (which didn’t do a thing to help!). Still, managed to stick with it, and I was glad I did! This session by Jonathan took us through the decisions we need to think about when we write SQL, in order to come out with better plans.

Most of this was familiar to me, but not in such an organised fashion. The one thing I did pick out of this session that I will be applying at work is (and this is probably sooooo obvious, only I’ve never considered it!): to draw a diagram of the tables and how they relate to the number of rows generated, etc. You can then see pictorially which might be the best table to start with, and where to go next. Simple, but brilliant!

Tom Kyte – Top 10, no 11, new features of Oracle database 11gR2
Aaah, Mr Kyte (or “Uncle Tom” as I used to refer to him back when I first started learning PL/SQL etc, and I followed AskTom religiously. Actually, for the first year or two, that was the only thing I really knew about; and I found it invaluable as a learning aid – Tom is one of the best teachers around, IMHO!) again. This was a list of features that he wanted to bring to our attention that are new in 11gR2. Some of them I already knew about, but some were completely unfamiliar to me!

I’ve already had some ideas on how to improve my db app once the databases have been upgraded to 11gR2, whenever that might be! I may well be pestering our DBAs for that to be sooner rather than later! *{;-)

Still too much red in this presentation, which unfortunately did not help my poor achey head and eyes any!

Doug Burns – More Parallel Fun
I know that Doug was less than happy with this presentation, and to be fair, he did suffer from a touch of BluePeter-itis, as the demos that had been running happily for him when he ran them earlier in the day went veeeeeery sloooooooooow during the presentation.

I thought that the presentation was good, though, as I was able to keep up with the content and understand what Doug was saying (although perhaps the graphs could maybe have done with being animated, to highlight the fact that we were looking at slices of time, rather than the whole thing at once – my confusion was soon put to rest when he explained what it was representing, though!). Having attended this and an earlier presentation on parallel that he gave at work, I now feel much more confident in working with parallel. I may even try making some of our big queries run in parallel – something that I’d never really considered seriously!

Meet the Speaker
I headed briefly to this, but didn’t really have anything intelligent to say or ask, plus I really was feeling unwell by this point, so I decided the best thing to do would be to go back to the hotel, and have some rest. I wasn’t really thinking coherently by now, because I passed one of my friends that I’ve known for years now from a bulletin board system that I am a member of – he was eating alone in a restaurant *{:-(

If I’d been thinking properly, I would have arranged to have met up and gone to dinner or dragged him along with me when I would have tagged along with Doug and met the big hitters that were apparently about on Monday evening at the exhibition party/technical pubs. But it was not to be – sorry @Farkough *{:-(

I ended up walking round the city centre trying to find somewhere that was open so I could buy some paracetamol, once I’d worked up the motivation to leave the hotel room. Thankfully, Boots were doing late night opening, so I got some, and on the way back to the hotel, I passed a Pizza Hut and couldn’t resist the comfort-food factor!