September 2012

Just a couple of announcements:

1. I had the message already a couple of days added to the "Upcoming Public Appearances" sidebar on the right hand side of this page, now the official home page is available and registration open for the "CBO Days" at Trivadis 11th and 12th December in Zurich.

Join Mohamed Zait (Manager of the Query Optimizer Group at Oracle), Maria Colgan (Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle), Jonathan Lewis, Jože Senegačnik, Christian Antognini and myself for two days fully focused on the Cost-Based Optimizer. You will not only learn about the history and present, but also the future of this very important Oracle Database component.

2. Oracle University is going to organize my one day master class "Mastering Parallel Execution" from December on.

I have been considering how to collect optimizer statistics for a PeopleSoft system running on an Oracle 11g database.  Despite 11g being several years old, most of my current customers are still using 10g, though some are looking at the upgrade to 11g.  I believe a slightly different approach is required.

In 2009, I wrote a series of blog postings on the subject of collecting statistics.  However these were all based on Oracle 10g.  I proposed a PL/SQL package that would use meta-data in a database table to determine how to collect statistics on a table, or deliberate supress collection of statistics.

Thank you very much for coming to my session "Beginning Performance Tuning" on the #IOUG track at #OOW12 Oracle Open World 2012. It makes the day for any speaker to see the room filled to capacity even at 9 AM on a Sunday morning. Much, much appreciated.

Here are the slides and the scripts I used in the demos. Please feel free to reuse the slides and scripts for for any purpose. All I ask is to give due credit to me. I imply no warranty and support for the materials. Use your discretion while using.

After another night with little sleep, Saturday was a chance to recover. I had no formal plans for the morning. I registered for OOW, then went out for breakfast with Marcelle, who then had to shoot to MySQL Connect.

From there I went back to my room for a little rest, then it was out to take Connor McDonald‘s advice and get a $15 T-Mobile SIM to get 7 day data access from my hotel room. Much cheaper than the hotel internet!

During the day I managed to hassle Marcus Eisele, Simon Haslam and Jakko Landlust about WebLogic stuff. It’s the classic case of “The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know”. Perhaps I should stop asking questions, so I can convince myself I’m a WebLogic God!