Are You Ready? Upcoming Conference in Perth

Just a quick note to draw attention to the lineup for AUSOUG National Conference – 3-4 November at the luxurious Burswood Resort here in Perth. The usual suspects will be there, for example:

• Chris Muir on Angels
• Tim Hall on a potential Killer extension
• Scott Wesley with Deeper Discussions (on Apex Security)
• Penny Cookson helping Oracle devs and Java devs work happily together
• Connor McDonald on A Year In Purgatory
• and myself 🙂

Signs of the coming Apocalypse? Who knows….

Plan your trip (and arrange your accommodation early, if you need it) and your conference schedule today!

Oracle OpenAustralia

The draft programme is out for the AUSOUG National Conference 2010.

If you’ll be in Perth in November I recommend you register and attend – a number of excellent papers will be presented, some of which I had the privilege of hearing when I was in Melbourne – you’ll learn new things, relearn old things you’d forgotten, and meet some giants in the Oracle world who will have travelled great distances to get here.

Some highlights, in no particular order:

• Steven Feuerstein – “Golden Rules for Developers”
• Penny Cookson – “Meet the CBO in Version 11g”
• Guy Harrison – “Optimizing Oracle databases on VMware”
• Mogens Nørgaard – “Licensing – Tales from the Trenches and other thoughts on Oracle”
• Tom Kyte – “The Best Way”
• Frank Bommarito – “Outlines, Profiles and SQL Plan Baselines”
• Connor McDonald – “A Better Way of Managing Optimizer Statistics”
• Mark Lancaster – “Building Advanced APEX 4.0 UIs with ExtJS”

I’ll be presenting my “Apex Themes and Templates” paper, which I presented in Melbourne last month – however it will be updated with a few additional bits and pieces that I’ve learned since then.

AUSOUG 2009

Finally the AUSOUG 2009 conference program is out!

Looks good – I’m looking forward to a number of sessions (10-11 Nov in Perth), including the new “ODTUG Oracle ACE” stream:

• Howard Ong – Oracle Designer RIP? – A First Look at Oracle Data Modeler
• Penny Cookson & Ray Tindall – Developing a Really Cute Application Using Ajax
• Scott Wesley – Trials & Tribulations of an Oracle Forms -> Apex Conversion
• Connor McDonald – SQL-ectric!
• Tim Hall – PL/SQL: It’s all in the Presentation

I’ll be speaking again, this time doing an “Intro to Python” for Oracle’rs. If you’ve never played with this wonderful language before I hope you’ll come along. Alternatively, if you’re keen to hear Penny talk about “Best Practices in Apex Development”, or Scott Hollows give his “History of Oracle – the early years”, I hope you’ll tell me all about it afterwards, because my talk is scheduled at the same time.

If you’re attending the Perth conference, say hooroo.

Not just a free lunch

When I first learned to drive, all our cars were automatics – and so that’s all I learned to drive. This never posed an issue to me until I married Rosalie who owns a manual. She tried to teach me, and I managed – kind of. It wasn’t until I had a chat with my uncle-in-law, who’s a mechanic, that it “clicked” with me. This is because he explained to me basically how the gear-change system works, which meant I now had a picture in my head of what was going on “under the hood” when I pushed the clutch in – it didn’t take long before I was smoothly changing gears and not making my passengers lurch forward and back like someone on a bucking bull.

I think that’s the way I learn things – I need to have a mental model of how a device is working internally before I can really use it effectively. To be useful the model doesn’t have to be greatly detailed or even perfectly accurate – it just has to be good enough that I can predict or guess what effect different actions will have on the equipment.

Today I enjoyed Richard Foote’s talk debunking a raft of common index-related myths today, followed by Penny Cookson sharing about bind peeking, and Connor McDonald giving some creative demos of RAC.

There was some material covered in part from recent articles on Richard’s blog but he explained clearly the mechanics of Oracle’s B-Tree and bitmap indexes, including how index statistics affect query plans. One highlight for me was the clear explanation of how the clustering factor (CF) is calculated, what it means and how to use it to diagnose why an index is not being used. I think I understand the CF much better than I did before because Richard explained it in a way similar to the way my uncle-in-law explained the clutch in a car – i.e. he explained how Oracle calculates it and uses it internally. He could have just said “a good CF is one that is close to the number of blocks, and a bad CF is one that is close to the number of rows”, but instead he explained how it works, which means this rule-of-thumb becomes more self-evident, and a whole lot more meaningful and useful.

Other highlights:

• • the mere existence of an index can change query plans dramatically, even if the index is not actually used by the query;

 

• • adding a ' ' (a string containing just a space) as the second column in an index on a nullable column means that all the nulls will be stored in the index; and

 

• he’s a big fan of David Bowie (who knew?)

Penny gave a quick overview of the problems of bind variable peeking, including a good explanation of why many 8i-to-9i upgrade projects experienced initial performance problems. There were some excellent tips for those of us not yet blessed with 11g on how to resolve (or at least work around) the problem of sql plans lurking in the shared pool, intermittently messing with query performance.

When we returned from afternoon tea for Connor’s talk, confronted with a table ominously equipped with ropes, children’s toys, toilet paper and lollies, we were treated to a talk which, by Connor’s standards, was a raving endorsement of RAC – by which I mean he did allow that it could very well be of benefit at some Oracle shops. Certainly the FUD surrounding RAC seems to have been cleared a bit.