AUSOUG Conference 2006 over
Another enjoyable conference. I’ve attended it every year since 2000 and this year’s was packed with presentations. Over 300 attendees spread over up to six presentations meant less crowding, I think; although as always there were a few packed sessions.
Highlights for me were:
- Connor’s “live demo” of 11g in Being a successful developer with Oracle
- Learning that cancelling a cursor is a good thing, but finding it can’t be done in PL/SQL – Anjo Kolk, The life of a cursor and its impact on the shared pool
- Trace Analysis on Steroids – Dave Moore’s talk was an eye-opener, not about performance-enhancing drugs (caffeine’s usually enough for me), but about Trace Analyzer. I thought this would be just another “if you’re not buying our product you’re wasting your time” talk, but in fact this is a totally free, open-source (PL/SQL!) tool that not only collates all the data from a trace file (as tkprof does), but also digs into your database to correlate the trace info with the data dictionary and present it all beautifully in HTML. Downloading and trying out this tool is definitely on my to-do list.
- Connor again, Odds and ends – an odd but arguably the best session to end the conference with. A number of tricks I’ll want to experiment with once I get a copy of the powerpoints (e.g. I wasn’t aware that contexts can be made “globally accessible”).
Thanks to the AUSOUG committee for another well-organised event.