Tuesday: it's raining today

The streets of San Franscisco are awash with rain. So are the pavements, sorry, sidewalks. Here and there stand clumps of delegates, in shock. Not just at the rain, but the fact that it is cold rain. Apparently Californians are only used to warm rain.

My colleagues back in Englan have gleefully e-mailed me to say they are having some lovely sunny autumn days. I say it just goes to show, Open World is work and not a jolly.

Anyway, next year Oracle are going to scale out the Howard Street tent to provide a covered walkway between all the hotels. Until then, it's unmbrellas and soggy shoes.

The return of The Scott And Larry Show

Waiting for the keynote to start, the screens loop an animation of stacked cubes labeled "Database","Applications", "Infrastructure" etc unfurling themselves into strands of little cubes which click-clack across the screen and then reform into the big cube. The effect is like a 3D version of the old skool game, Snake, in which you have to direct an ever-elongating python so it swallows mice, spiders and other small creatures.

So anyway, on comes Scott McNealy in a sweater he describes as being "Oracle maroon". I think Open World has missed Scott.. He was one of the few keynote speakers who you could rely on to entertain as well as inform. He kicked off with a Top Ten of Signs Engineers Have Gone Wild. Alongside things like OS2 and USB drives shaped like sushi he had the iPhone user interface. That was an odd choice, because the iPhone is game-changing device and its interface is a marvel of engineering in the service of design.

His next top ten were Sun Innovations. This included SPARC, Java, CoolThreads, NFS and Project Blackbox. It also included "Open Source software" which is debatable. But even if it is true, it highlights Sun's problem: Java was innovative, it was a game-changer and it is ubiquitous. Unfortunately Sun failed to make much - if any - money from Java. Nobody can accuse Steve Jobs of failing to capitalise on the iPhone's innovatory qualities.

The rest of Scott's session was devoted to reassuring us (and him?) that Sun's legacies would thrive under Oracle. James Gosling came on to tell us that most of Oracle's biggest selling products, the Apps and Middleware, are just "big bags of Java". Then John Fowler laid the groundwork for the last section of the keynote. Sun systems are now number one in seven key commercial benchmarks - OLTP, Oracle BI, SAP etc - because Sun has an integrated computing infrastructure, and because they address efficiency as well as performance. The latest Sun drive is the 1.8TB F5100, a Flash drive which has a capacity equivalent to thousands of disks and runs at a mere 300 watts.

This was all by way of introduction to Larry Ellison. Larry's brief was to address head-on IBM's campaign of FUD directed at Sun customers. They are going to invest more in SPARC, in Solaris, even in MySQL. "We think we can make MySQL a better product and we think we can make some money along the way." Addressing the question of servers and storage, he cited an interesting comparison: Apple. Apple have solved the problem of combining hardware and software and this enables them to deliver products which are clearly differentiated from those of their competitors, who are often consortia.

Together Sun and Oracle have the strength to "beat the giant". That is, IBM. Larry then unveiled the headlines of their attempt on IBM's TPC-C benchmark record. The Sun/Oracle cluster had almost 25% more throughput, with a response times which was two hundred times faster. The Sun/Oracle challenger consisted of nine racks in a fault-tolerant configuration, whereas IBM used a behemoth of seventy-six racks which had single points of failure. To top it off, the IBM configuration used six times as much electricity ("Now we know why IBM's microprocessor is called 'Power'", quipped Larry, although I'm not sure the per machine usage quite justifies that zinger).

Larry rounded off by announcing a $10million challenge: your application will run two times faster on Sun and Oracle than it does on IBM, or you win ten million dollars. This is an interesting development: IBM are big Oracle customers, not to mention partners in many areas. Also there are other manufacturers of hardware who will be monitoring the "Apple-fication" of Oracle with some nervousness.

But in the meantime we can look forward to the Grand Smackdown: Team Read versus Big Blue. It's so on.

Sunday: still on the same kick

One of the advantages of membership of the Jet Lag Junta is that I had already been awake for several hours when Tom Kyte kicked off Oracle Develop at 09:00 on Sunday morning. The topic of Tom's talk was What are we still doing wrong? It was a good mix of insight and humour. He covered:

1. Underestimating complexity
   
2. Not knowing how to ask for help
   
3. We write/generate way too much code
   
4. We pretend everything will be alright
   
5. Security matters.
   

I think Tom would be the first to admit that most of these are things he has been banging on about for years. That is rather the point. His talk was peppered with recent examples of badly-formed code, useless error messages, poorly-asked forum questions and other horrors. One pertinent item concerned the T-Mobile Sidekick (a kind of mobile phone) which stores all its - i.e. your - information in the cloud. Only their storage provider applied an upgrade to the production server without taking a backup. And in the process lost everybody's data - contacts, photos, the lot. Doh!

Tom got a spontaneous round of applause for an extended riff on when others then null which ended "if it's okay for all of your code to not run some of the time then it's okay for it to never run. So take it out." I think if he had included a "Can I get a 'Amen'?" in there he would have got one those too.

My session went pretty well. I think. It was standing room only, which was nice. Both Steven Feuerstein and Bryn Llewellyn were in the audience, which was a bit daunting. I opted for the lectern microphone, which was a mistake; I occasionally misjudged the distance, so the sound levels on the recording will probably be wild. The annoying thing was a problem with the projectors, which washed out the slides. Some were virtually invisible. Fortunately they were mainly there as supporting wallpaper for my talk but it was still frustrating after all the effort I had put in to them. There were no questions at the end, which worries me slightly. But on the other hand hardly anybody walked out, so I hope they got something from it.

I stayed with the Design Patterns thing by going to hear Robin Smith and Shailendra Mishra talk about Design Patterns for Complex Event Processing. As it turned out there were not really any design patterns as such, just an introduction to Oracle's CEP implementation. They have extended ANSI 92 SQL to include a temporal component. This means we can query a STREAM of events using a SELECT ... FROM statement just like a database table. Furthermore we can use WHERE clauses and even join the out put from a stream with regular database tables. Plus the demo included a Google Maps plug-in which the changed colours of the pins in real time. Cool!

Then I went to hear Bryn Llewellyn's talk on Edition-Based Redefinition. This is a very exciting new feature of 11gR2 It will allow us to apply changes to database code and structures online, in production, invisibly to the users. The key to this is running the old code and the new code in parallel. This is achieved with Editions. An Edition is basically a copy of a set of database objects. We can change some of them in the new Edition. Items such as tables are not editionable, so they need to have structures which support both the old and the new edition. DML changes are applied transparently to both using Cross Edition triggers and the data is retrieved using Editioned Views.

We can run both Editions in parallel for as long as we like, in a period rather sexily called Hot Rollover. But eventually we switch all our users over to the new Edition and we can drop the remnants of the old edition in slow time. Oracle are marketing this as a High Availability feature but I think the main attraction for developers will be the chance to put an end to Upgrade Failure Misery. Editions give us the opportunity to get the code in place, migrate the data and generally make sure everything is working properly before we announce the release of 2.1 to our users.

There are some interesting limitations. There is no ability to reference an object by Edition. We can set the Edition for a session, programmatically, but all the objects we see are determined by the set Edition. Tables are not - and never will be - editionable. A non-Editioned item cannot depend on an Editioned item. That means that tables cannot use an Editioned Type and function-based indexes cannot use an Editioned function.

I thought Edition-Based Redefinition is such a cool feature that it would be a Chargeable Optional, like all the other recent cool features (yes, RAT, I'm talking about you). But in fact the opposite is true. Not only is Editions not an option it is mandatory: when we install 11gR2 our database has a default Edition. But if we want to make use of the Redefinition capability we have to do some work to re-jig the schema (rename all the tables, put in Editioned views with the old table names). That has to happen offline. But Bryn promises us it will be the last offline upgrade we'll ever do.

Saturday: The light of San Francisco is a sea light

Weather is going to be a feature of the conference this year. As the plane made its final approach into SFO out of the windows we could see this enormous blanket of fog laying siege to the city. The city itself was clear and the towers of Downtown glittered in the sunshine. Outside the airport, waiting for a taxi the sun was shining strongly enough to make me wish I had brought some sunscreen. But walking about SF later there was a cool wind. So a jacket, while not strictly required, was welcome.

There's more weather to come. Apparently some "tropical moisture" left over from a hurricanetyphoon is heading our way from the Pacific. So they are forecasting rain, some of it heavy, for Monday through Wednesday. It is unfortunate that the conference rucksack doesn't include an umbrella this year; some sponsor might have got a lot of goodwill, not to mention advertising. Being English I never travel without a brolly, but I may end up wishing I had brought a mac as well.

So the Howard Street tent might get more use this year. Outside the Moscone Center a couple of its staff were having a cigarette break. One of them, staring morosely at the tent, said to his companion "Between tomorrow and Thursday, it's going to be hell".

We shall see.

Speaking at Open World 2009

All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey. Which hackneyed line can only mean one thing: OpenWorld 2009 is upon us. I have applied for Bloggers' credentials so it occurred to me that I had better resume posting, in case anybody checks up on these things.

One of the reasons why I haven't blogged anything recently is that I have been working hard on my presentation. My talk is called Designing PL/SQL with Intent (seats still available!). I haven't coded any PL/SQL for work this year, which ironically has given me time to actually think about it. My session is concerned with building PL/SQL APIs and doesn't really touch on the internals (I'll leave that to Tom, Bryn and Steven). Because I am talking about design, I have spent an inordinate amount of time of the look of my slide deck. So this recent Dilbert cartoon was a little too close to the bone....


I'm in the Oracle Develop event. My slot is 13:15 on Sunday, less than twenty-four hours after I land at SFO. So I will probably still really jetlagged. But at least I'll get it over with, so I can relax and enjoy the rest of the week.

Missing Open World

A belated post, because it still hurts that I wasn't able to go to Open World this year. But I console myself with the thought that many people probably couldn't go either. Besides, if I had to skip a year, OO2K8 was a good one to skip: no announcements on Fusion Middleware, nothing on 11gR2. I suppose the lack of big product launches and the concomitant absence of marketing hoo-hah left more space for useful technical sessions, but those would have been focused on 11g and 10gR2, which is still as far away as it ever was for my project.

Such announcements as there were seem rather ho-humish. Is there more to Oracle's support for the cloud than jumping on a fashionable bandwagon? Well there is Oracle's partnership with Intel. It's official: Larry now likes x86 chips more than he likes SPARCs. In fact, I think the big story from Open World is the dissolution of the Sun-Oracle relationship. For over a decade, Oracle on Solaris has gone together like a horse and carriage. Not any more.

The most significant thing about Ellison's keynote was not Exadata appliance itself - it's a rather niche product - but the fact that the hardware is supplied by HP. In the old days the hardware would have been Sun, but then Sun went and bought MySQL and things went rather sour. Funnily enough last week Sun announced a remarkably similar sounding device they
were building for Fox Interactive Media, albeit using "Greenplum's data warehousing software on Sun's Solaris/ZFS based OpenStorage platforms".

Despite what I said earlier there were many interesting sounding presentations. Jared Still recently listed a few of them on Oracle-L. I hope that they will eventually be made available to the masses. At the moment there's only Oracle on demand which is demanding - oh ho! - $700 for streaming access to the presentations. I think I'll pass.

OOW2K7 vs UKOUG2007

Having attended the two conferences so close together makes it easy for me to compare them. There are obvious differences. San Francisco in November is warmer, sunnier and all together more attractive than Birmingham in December. Open World is much much larger. But the UKOUG felt more tiring, at least to me. This is because the UKOUG packs a lot more into each day.

Open World is distributed across several sites. In order to give delegates sufficinet time to get from a session in the Westin St Francis to Moscone South there is a half hour gap between sessions. There are no sessions whilst the key notes are on. There are no sessions during lunch hour. The UKOUG schedules sessions with only ten minutes between them. The streams are staggered, so that there were always sessions during lunch. This obviously provides value for the delegates by offering a vast number of sessions to attend. But it also makes us feel guilty about skipping a session in order to go round the exhibition hall.

Another difference is the networking opportunities. Oracle have started putting a lot more effort into providing portals for delegates to get in contact with each other and places where people can meet and converse. This is easier because Moscone Center has some big spaces which can be used for such purposes.

Both conferences are valuable. I learned a lot from attending both. But Open World was much more relaxed. I think the fact that I have just blogged about UKOUG Wednesday more than two weeks after the end of the conferences says it all.

OOW2K7: Not so San Fran Psycho

Last year OpenWorld seemed crowded, manic and just generally too much. By contrast OpenWorld07 was pretty chilled. There was only one session where I had to wait in a really long queue. There was the one occasion when I was in a long line of people tramping into Moscone South as another long line of people going in the opposite direction to Moscone West. And only once was I in a queue for the restrooms - and that was during OTN Night, when the amount of beer on offer had generated, um, extra throughput. Certainly this morning, as I found myself pressed up against some bloke's wet raincoat in a crammed tube train, I really missed the light and space in San Francisco.

I think this calmness wasn't because there were fewer people - there were more - but because the OOW Team learned lots of lessons from last year. They couldn't really scale out - they are at the limits of what is possible in San Francisco - but they organised things to spread the load as evenly as possible and to avoid the need for too many people moving from building to building. You can figure out your own RAC/PQ metaphor :)

The other reason why this year was calmer was due to the lack of hype. I think many of us were expecting to be continually hit over the head with 11g. But really it was quite low key; lots of sessions on New Features but no real publicity blitz. this is partly to do with the early release of the software taking the edge off things but I also think the licensing issue has something to do with it. Many of the coolest features are chargeable extras to the Enterprise Edition. If you have already got customers who have to rip chips out of their servers to be able to afford to run Oracle it's hard to get a sympathetic audience for news about stuff that's going to cost a whole lot more.

The thing that disappointed me most this year was missing out on presenting in the Unconference. The Unconference sessions were scheduled on the hour. The nature of Unconference is to be different from the conference. But attending one Unconference session meant skipping two regular conference sessions. Wednesday was the only afternoon I had a free two-hour slot but I didn't nab the last remaining 3:00pm slot when I had the chance, so I really have only myself to blame.

The thing I liked best was the series of presentations from the Real World Performance group. I know before the conference I downplayed the significance of the sessions. So sue me. Meeting some old friends from cyberspace and putting faces to new ones was very pleasant too. And at least I didn't suffer too much from jet-lag.

The next OpenWorld is in September 2008. That's only ten months away.... I'm keeping my fingers crossed I get to go again.

OOW2K7: The Real World Performance Group

The Real World Performance Group is not Peter Gabriel jamming in a muddy field with a bunch of Senegalese drummers. It is a small unit on Oracle's development side, dedicated to understanding database server performance and investigating customers' problems. I included Andrew Holdworth's session on Database performance trends in my schedule having never heard of the group. After that presentation I went to the Group's Round Table session and Andrew's other session the following day, neither of which I had scheduled. He was that good.

The whole series of sessions switched on a number of light bulbs, joining up some of the dots from earlier presentations I had attended. The resulting illumination made me realise I had spent the a large chunk of the last six months barking up the wrong tree. Basically, the sort of session which justifies the whole idea of going to conferences. That's why I've forgone my usual pithy reports in favour of a full-blown dump of my notes from the three sessions. Where the same topic came up more than once I have aggegated all the material in the section which seems most appropriate.

Database performance trends

Andrew Holdsworth opened his session with the observation that most sub-optimal applications are running well enough, because of improvements in CPU speeds and the availability of cheap RAM, which means we can have bigger DB caches. However, in larger databases disk I/O becomes more significant: an SQL statement which requires disk reads for one percent of the data will run one hundred times slower than a query which can be wholly satisfied from memory. Interconnects to remote RAC clusters perform much better than disk I/O.

Most database applications out there are very small. Frequently there are multiple databases on a single server (the most he has seen was forty-nine databases on one host). This is not a problem because the applications are generally used quite lightly, with barely one SQL statement running on the box at any given time. The main challenge is to prevent a single rogue statement stealing all the resources from the other applications. However, there are also a relative handful of really big systems which are rigorously designed and with a single database deployed per host. These applications are owned by significant Oracle customers and have high visibility within the company. Consequently such databases drive the direction of Oracle's development program. These are the sort of databases which demand tuning, because their performance issues cannot be resolved simply by faster CPUs.

The basic practices for good performances are:

1. Spend time on data modelling. It is easier to tune against good schemas; they are simpler and less error-prone.
2. Pay attention to cursor and session management, Use the middle tier to protect the database.
3. Do proper capacity planning. If possible, use intelligent extrapolation from existing systems. Either way, test and validate.
4. Use database features correctly and appropriately. Always start with the default values and change them only with good reason. (This point was expanded in another session.
5. Design for predictable perform. Strive for SQL plan stability, but be prepared for dealing with increasing data volumes, which may demand new execution plans.

Andrew devoted a lot of time discussing benchmarks, as the group spend a lot of time running them. Of TPC benchmarks he asked, "Who likes TPC benchmarks? Who believes them?" A vast amount of work goes into them: the time spent optimizing a server for a TPC benchmark is an order of magnitude greater than a customer would spend on tuning their database. Price performance figures are suspect. There is no redundancy (because in the context of a benchmark that inflates the cost without offering any performance advantage), so the configurations are unreliable even dangerous.

They also see a lot of client benchmarks. About nine in ten are dysfunctional: ill-conceived, incomplete and unrealistic. They are time-consuming and expensive to run, and stressful for all concerned: if you inflict a poor benchmark on the RWPG team be sure that they will respond by picking on your cluelessness. Common failings are:

• an invalid mix of transaction types;
• no "think time" for the emulated users;
• poor data sets;
• in particular, the use of random numbers to seed the data sets so the tests are not repeatable;
• not allowing for the resources used by the application server;
• data warehouse tests which fire off 2000 concurrent parallel queries on a twenty CPU box;
• data warehouse tests which don't distinguish between small, medium or large queries.

His advice is to run it in-house before sharing it with Oracle Support.

His final point was about priorities. The four layers of a database system are, in increasing order of expense: server, interconnects, I/O fabric, storage. Often the cheapest element - the server - is chosen first, and insufficient attention is paid to balancing all the hardware. Storage and network technology has not kept up with CPU speeds: by comparison with them server costs are a rounding error.

The round table

Members of the audience wrote questions on index cards which were passed to the panel. The panel filtered questions according to some strict rules of engagement. The topics had to be of relevance to the largest possible chunk of the audience. On-stage debugging was expressly forbidden. There was some overlap with the preceding and subsequent presentations, so here are a few points which weren't covered in depth elsewhere.

How much SGA is too much? There is no upper bound. Just don't exceed the physical RAM. With DSS we want sorts and joins to write as little as possible to the temporary tablespace so set the PGA to a high value. Aim to have 4-8GB of SGA per core.

The 11g resultset cache uses CPU and RAM. This offers a more favourable price performance than disks, which are just getting bigger without getting better.

The AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE option with DBMS_STATS is an iterative process. So using it is likely to produce a more accurate sample size than us just picking a percentage value, as we tend not to validate our choice.

There is a problem with bind variable peeking, if the first instances of a query happens to use unrepresentative values. We can solve this through seeding the library cache at start-up by running our key queries with representative bind values.

The answer is always in the data.

Making appropriate use of database technology

The team's original idea for this session had been to cover every database feature. Realising that would have required a four day course (at least) in the end Andrew Holdsworth decided to focus on three key areas:
Parallel Query - lots of people pay for the licences but don't use it properly.
The Optimizer - the part of the database customers find most frustrating.
Session and Connection management - a new but increasing problem.

The code for parallel query has improved considerably over the years but customers are not using it because CPUs have got so fast. The trend is to substitute processor brawn for good design. This is not a sensible strategy with DSS databases, because the chance of resource contention is much greater if the queries take too long to run.

Making Parallel Query work well places a premium on capacity planning. There has to be sufficient bandwidth to support the required throughput down the entire hardware stack. If the server has only got two 100MB HBAs PQ is impossible. Don't just focus on the server; CPUs are the cheap bit ... apart from the licences (AH's joke).

A thumb nail guide to capacity planning. To support a throughput 100MB per second per core (based on the de facto standard unit of a server with four quad-core processors):

4 CPUs x 4 cores x 100MB =	1.6GB of I/O
4 CPUs x 4 cores x 100MB =	1.6GB of interconnect
# of disks =	1.6GB/s / 20MB/s per disk = 80 disks

Note: this doesn't include redundancy for high availability (data warehouses are not allowed to be down anymore).

"Death by indexes". Indexes are great for OLTP but not for DSS which generally rely on aggregation which in turn requires large amounts of data. Indexed reads which accesses only 0.1% of the data performs worse than a full table scan. Lots of indexes will lead to low CPU utilisation. A better approach is to use PQ to haul in large amounts of data quickly and use the powerful CPUs to winnow it: 5ms is a lot of computation time. Partitioning the object to take advantage of query pruning will increase the percentage of relevant rows retrieved, which will further reduce the need for indexes. Use hash partitions for fast joining.

Designing for PQ:

• Take the database's default for the Degree of Parallelism.
  
• Use the resource manage to define the user's DoP.
  
• Make the number of hash partitions a power of two.
  
• Also, make it a multiple of the DoP.
  
• Allow for the concomitant impact on loading, data dictionary management, stats gathering.

The Optimizer is the most maligned, most misunderstood and most misused part of the database. This is in no small part due to Oracle's failure to explain and document it properly. Consequently people tune by Google or witchcraft, which usually means setting underscore parameters. This is a bad idea. Setting init.ora parameters has a global impact: fix one query and break three others. We're setting the values blindly - often underscore parameters have magic values. Most bad execution plans are due to bad stats. The quality of the stats is under our control. We know our data. Whereas the execution of the optimizer is under Oracle's control and it is rocket science. Tweaking the settings of underscore parameters is fiddling with the bit we don't understand instead of fixing the bit we do.

Optimizer basics

• Run with the default parameter values.
  
• Don't make global changes.
  
• Hints do not guarantee stability over time.
  
• Get the statistics gathering right.
  
• Accept change will happen.
  
• TEST!
  
• When upgrading, accept that your database's previous good performance may just have been luck rather than a testament to your tuning expertise ;)

Gathering stats: start with default values. AUTO everything. Remember, the aim is to get good cardinality estimates.

Table stats are easy. Don't sweat them. An increase in 10% of the rows is unlikely to mean your stats really are stale: think order of magnitude changes.

Columns stats are the key to good performance - size and number of columns, histograms, indexes. Use your knowledge of the data model to figure out whether you have uniform or skewed distributions. Columns with uniform distributions don't need histograms; watch out for bind variable peeking with skewed data. Minimum and maximum values are the ones most susceptible to change (especially for columns populated by sequences) so maybe refreshing the high and low values after each data load is sufficient.

The key to query tuning is to check the correctness of the cardinality estimates. Use DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY_CURSOR to see the estimated cardinality alongside the actual cardinality. No need for a 10053 trace (which doesn't give us the real cardinality values anyway).

Connections stress servers, especially SMP, causing latch contention and using lots of CPU. There is a tendency for Java and .Net programmers to be very bad at managing sessions (and cursors). This is because their memory model means they tend to take stuff and not give it back. Connection storms occur when a connection pool floods the server. Connection storms are caused by a problem in the database server which prevents it from satisfying the app server's demands for new connections The app server responds by spawning further sessions. This can escalate quickly to tens of thousands of sessions, which will kill the database server.

Best practice for connection management:

• 5 - 10 connections per core (I/O dependent);
  
• minimise logons and logoffs;
  
• avoid parsing;
  
• set parameter for minimum and maximum connections per server to the same value.

Final thoughts

I was a bit concerned that I found so much of value in these sessions. Perhaps I had been living in a cave for too long? However, I met up with Doug Burns afterwards and he said that he was going to have rewrite his presentations and whitepapers. As he is Mr Parallel Query I found this quite reassuring.

Andrew Holdsworth observed, when talking about the recommendations for parallel query, we can try this stuff for ourselves but they do it for a living.

OOW2K7: Simply cowbell

A theme emerges. Oracle announced Oracle VM Server on Monday. Today in his keynote Jonathan Schwartz announced Sun xVM Server. Do two similar products make a trend? It will have to do.

The bulk of Jonathan's keynote was devoted to the proposition that giving away things made good business sense. The argument is, "Developers don't buy things, they join things". Contributing lots of stuff to open source initiatives fosters communities which in turn leads to adoption and that in turn generates demand for the things which Sun sells. Certainly Microsoft has been very successful by treating developers well. I think the difference is that Microsoft still makes a lot of money out of software and operating systems; they really don't care that much about the hardware. Whereas Sun's main revenue stream comes from servers. Java and OpenSolaris and all the other giveaways have been taken up with great enthusiasm; you just need to look at the exhibition hall to understand that developers like free stuff. And of course Java in particularly has spurred the growth of the internet and generated demand for servers and network kit, but that demand is just as likely to be met by Dell or HP as Sun.

Jonathan had a surprize guest: Michael Dell. This was by way of announcing that Dell and Sun would now be partnering. To symbolise the partnership Michael Dell brought Jonathan a Dell T-Shirt. Afterwards, Jonathan confided that backstage Michael told him the T-Shirt was XL, because he was "a CEO now". Jonathan joked, "That's my hat-size not my T-Shirt size."

Larry's keynote was good, a polished performance. He did two short presentations. The first was about Unbreakable Linux and the new VM Server. These are both aimed at promoting Linux. There are now over fifteen hundred enterprises using Oracle's Linux support. The VM server is Linux but it's a new Linux, not the Red Hat code-base which underpins Unbreakable Linux. So perhaps this is the start of the much anticipated Oracle distro. The other presentation was about Fusion Apps. The first Fusion Apps will be released next year. From now on all new Apps will be Fusion - SOA, built-in BI and with SaaS as an option. But it's going to be an evolutionary process. There is no date for the complete Fusion-ization of E-Business Suite.

After that there was a demonstration of the first Fusion App: Sales Force Automation. This is a suite of products - Sales Prospector, Sales Reference and Sales Tools - which will make salespeople more productive. These products leverage social networking principles to facilitate the sharing of information, ideas and documents between sales staff. So the first tools in the new framework are aimed at helping sales people sell more: how very Oracle. The actual tools are fantastically slick. Total eye-candy. The Fusion developers have done a marvellous job with the AJAX widgets. In fact the whole thing looks so lovely I predict a sharp drop in productivity as the sales people spend all day stroking their way through their cache of PowerPoint slides.

Larry then took questions. There were several questions about Fusion Apps and a couple about licencing. Did you know Oracle's preferred licencing approach was to arrange unlimited usage deals with their customers? Me neither, they sure kept that one quiet. Somebody asked, apropos of the Sunday Night Live event, whether Larry had more fun as a start-up or now. The answer was that he much prefers his current situation. Which just isn't fair: he earns gobs of money and enjoys his job more than ever. He only lost his cool once, with a person who attempted to suggest that the profit from Microsoft sales went to the Gates Foundation. Larry cut him off. After acknowledging Bill's generosity he said, "The Gates Foundation is fully funded. If you buy a copy of Microsoft Word the money doesn't go to a person in Peru." Not unless Steve Ballmer has a holiday villa in Lima.

There were two odd things about Larry's session. The first was that Billy Joel came on as the warm-up man. Luckily he hadn't brought his piano - Larry was obviously itching to do his karaoke Uptown Girl. The second oddity was the thing which Larry didn't talk about. The database. Not a peep about the 11g release. So obviously he agrees with me about it being old news. No mention of the rumoured 10.2.0.4 either.

Before Jonathan Schwartz's keynote there was a little piece of Web Two-Point-Noughtery. The screen posed a question and people could SMS their answers. Here are a selection of the answers to the question If I could develop the next killer app it would be:

• Simple
• Stable
• Fast
• Something to do my laundry
• Cat cams
• Portable
• Mine
• In the conservatory with a candlestick
• Simply cowbell
• Integrate Microsoft and Oracle well
• Sharks with frikken lasers on their heads
• Something that takes text messages and projects them on a screen
• COWBELL!

Update

I have now heard that the 10.2.0.4 patch is coming. Apparently its schedule got bumped to clear the path for the 11g launch. Safe harbour and all that, but it may contain backports of some (minor) 11g functionality as well as bug fixes.

Oh, and if you thought my coverage of Larry's keynote was jaundiced you really ought to read The Register's report. Slammin'!

OOW2K7: Like, er, Day Two Man

Tuesday at OpenWorld 2007 for me opened with Tom Kyte's keynote. This was something different from Tom. Instead of talking SQL he talked about innovative ideas and the creative thinking process. His key point was that we have to recognise the danger of educated incapacity: too much knowledge can blind us to the existence of certain solutions. The answer is not to know nothing but to use our knowledge wisely. In particular we need to distinguish between what we know that really is true and what we think we know is true but which is in fact assumption or prejudice on our part.

One of the examples of creative thinking he used was an example of tuning from Craig Shallamar. The problem was in a stock control application. The workers would run a report which generated a picklist; the picklist was produced on the printer next to the terminal. They took the picklist and went to the warehouse. The problem was the report took three minutes to run. Craig spent a lot of time tuning the query and shaved about ten percent off the runtime. But ten percent of three minutes still means a long time for the workers to be waiting for the picklist to be printed. Then he noticed that the printer was on a network. So he had it moved to the warehouse. The workers ran the report and crossed over to the warehouse; by the time they had arrived the picklist had been printed. That's fast!

Tom finished up with a lament about the state of developer-DBA relations. Too often DBAs seemed to spend their time trying to prevent developers from doing things whilst the developers spend their days inventing ways to circumvent the DBA. This is a terrible waste of creativity.

Ray Roccaforte opened his presentation on Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in 11g with a similar philosophical perspective. Indeed, a cosmic question. Given Moore's Law and given the pervasiveness of computers in all aspects of our lives why isn't the quality of our lives doubling every eighteen months? More mundanely, why isn't the productivity of our IT departments doubling every eighteen months?

His answer is that data volumes are growing even faster than Moore's Law. Yahoo had 100TB of data in 2005; two years on it has 250TB. And as disk speeds are lagging behind computing is actually slowing down. Oracle's strategy to deal with this:

• to scale to any size;
• put analytics in the database;
• put ELT in the database.

Incidentally that last point is not a typo: the preferred term is now Extract Load Transform because most of the transformation is done in the database.

Ray showed us a screen filled with 11g New Features for BI and DW - far more than he could cover in the session, so he just ran through some key points. There are further enhancements to partitioning, including the much sought after INTERVAL option and also the REF partition, which equi-partitions parent and child tables on the basis of foreign key values. There is the much reported SQL Resultset caching. There are enhancements to automatic statistics gathering, which will monitor the SQL statements run and gather stats on correlations between frequently queried sets of columns.

The big announcement is probably the changes to the OLAP cube. BI is dominated by aggregation queries. The classical solution is to build Materialized Views, but it is often imposible to build enough MVs, let alone manage and refresh huge numbers of them. In 11g the optimizer will treat an OLAP cube as a Materialized View, and will use query rewrite to access data in the cube, just like with MVs now. This means there is only one object to manage and the refresh window is considerably reduced. The OLAP cube can be interrogated using straight SQL statements, so advanced analytic queries can be added to any application.

Finally Oracle Warehouse Builder is included in the database at no extra cost, although one of the big draws, the Data Quality pack, will be a licenceable option.

Then it was off to the Oracle Magazine lunch. I got invited because I'm on the editorial advisory board. I felt guilty about it because I hadn't been asked to do anything in the last year but Tom Haunert was very magnanimous: it was his fault for not asking the board to do things. I was at the same table as Dr Paul Dorsey, which could have been embarrassing but I guess he doesn't read my blog. Also there was Lonneke Dikmans, the SOA Developer of the Year. Fortunately she and Paul have reached a good-tempered rapprochement on the merits or otherwise of SOA. I had an awkward moment with Tom Clark, CIO of PCA because I was out of practice at convesing with guys in suits. However, he turned out to be a really nice guy, and possibly the most unlikely fellow vegetarian I've met in a long time. I also chattered with Patrick Wolf and Jon Waldron.

Alas I missed the XML presentation but I did get to hear Donald Feinberg, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner on the future challenges of OLTP and Data Warehousing for DBMS tools. This was the first time I had attended a Gartner presentation and it was really interesting. He specifically avoided mentioning any vendors because Gartner has to be neutral and this was an Oracle conference. But much of what he said chimed with other presentations I've attended: management of large data volumes, the importance of data quality, the physics of disk speeds, the importance of analytics. In fact I'm going to have to write up this one separately, once I've had some more time to think about it.

I rounded off the day by chilling out in the OTN Lounge on the third floor of Moscone West. I think the crew have finally found the right formula for the lounge as there's always lots of people there. Steven Feuerstein was doing a Meet The Experts session and I lurked at the back. I even managed to answer a question which Steven couldn't. This only happens one every other year so I claim bragging rights. Somebody asked what was the best way to pivot a table. Steven he wasn't sure but he would probably write some PL/SQL. So I pointed out that 11g had a PIVOT function. He laughed and said he didn't do SQL. Of course not, he's cured his addiction.

Then it was down off to the Thirsty Bear for the Bloggers' Meetup. As well as us old lags there were lots of new faces, which is an indication of just how the Oracle blogging community has grown over the last twelve months. Drink was taken and I think everybody had a good time. Thanks to Mark Rittman and OTN's Vikki Lira for organising it.

OOW2K7: Non-fake tales from San Francisco

One of the things at OpenWorld which continues to astonish me is the rudeness of people in the audience. At the UKOUG we start each session with a reminder to switch off mobile phones, or at least silence them. Here, people not only have their mobile phones on, they actually take calls whilst the presenter is talking. This is not an isolated event: it has already occurred in three out of the seven sessions I've attended so far. Also people conduct conversations during the presentation, and not in whispers either. This is particularly strange given that, outside of the conference hall, Americans are generally far more courteous and better mannered than most English people these days.

Another thing which is shocking to the out-of-town visitor is the sheer number of beggars on the street. One guy I saw yesterday was holding a sign which said I need a girlfriend. I'm not quite sure what he was expecting to be dropped in his cup. There was another guy playing a drumset improvised out of buckets and plastic containers whose sign included his e-mail address. I didn't catch whether it had a PayPal number too.

This year OpenWorld is a green conference. This primarily means that we could choose to have the conference directory as a thick book or a lightweight USB drive. The catch is we need to have a device which takes a USB drive. For those of us who left our laptop at home the dead-tree option is the appropriate technological choice. However I have seen a couple of people attempt to plug their OOW pen drive into a laptop in the Conference internet villages; unsuccessfully, because these babies are totally locked down. The other interesting green initiative is the opportunity to pre-order an Oracle-branded messenger bag which will be made out of recycled conference material. This item will be even more fashionable than that Sainsburys carrier bag because of the absolute coolness of the Oracle logo.

The OTN team are giving away T-Shirts in the OTN lounge. The front features a SQL statement:

SELECT Java, Linux, PHP, DotNet, Python, Ruby
FROM  OTN
WHERE Self BETWEEN 'Newbie AND 'Expert'

So, apart from the fact that it doesn't mention PL/SQL and the fact that the statement is invalid due to the missing quote, it's a pretty good attempt.

Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco would like us all to explore more of the city than a two-block radius of the Moscone Centre:

"You can continue on the F line to Pier 45, walk into the back and experience the fish processing, which is totally frenetic and interesting. Why not see and experience another side, which is the fact that San Francisco remains the largest fish processing center on the West Coast."

Why not indeed.

OOW2K7: Steven Feuerstein - A clarification

Whilst I'm in the mood for clarification I suppose I should make clear that Steven Feuerstein did not threaten me with a steak knife. He pretended to threaten me with a steak knife and I exaggerated for comic effect.

OOW2K7: Doug Burns - A clarification

In my post about the ACEs' dinner I described Doug Burns as being extremely jet-lagged. Some people have interpreted this as meaning Doug had taken too much drink. This is not the case. Doug really is jet-lagged. Honest he is. Anytime you see Doug with a beer in his hand you can be sure it's definitely for medicinal purposes only.

OOW2K7: More about Monday

Bryn Llewellyn's talk overran slightly - there is that much which is new about PL/SQL in 11g - so I only just made it to the Moscone Center for Nitin Vengurlekar's talk on Back-of-the-envelope Database Storage Design. The main thing I took from this talk was that we need to have big envelopes. It was a useful overview for me, as I knew nothing about this area of IT systems. For instance, I learned the difference between throughput and good-put; throughput is the total amount of network traffic whereas good-put is the amount of useful bits transferred i.e. throughput minus network protocol, retransmitted packets, etc. I now know that we can specify our requirements in either MBytes/second or IOPS but they are mutually exclusive. What I don't know is in what scenarios I should be using IOPS rather than MBytes. Transactions/s is a useless metric because it can mean many things to us database practitioners and it means nothing to storage dudes. The other particularly useful part of this presentation was a break down of all the layers of the I/O stack, identifying all of the components which could be a choke-point. A system's I/O is only as fast as its slowest component.

I had a quick wander through the Exhibition hall. I didn't pick up much in the way of loot but AccentureEDS has a really useless but potentially time-consuming geegaw: it's a sticky plasticky bundle of tentacles on a elasticated string - sort of a cross between a yoyo and a primary-coloured Cthulu.

The last session of Monday was Juan Loaiza's talk on Scalability and Performance enhancements in 11g. He opened with some recent benchmarks. He started with the bad boys - 4 million transactions per minute , 1 million physical I/O per second. He said they like these sorts of benchmarks because it's the only time they get to play with such enormous systems; the above mentioned benchmark used 2TB of RAM (which costs about $4m - still a lot of money even at current exchange rates). The interesting benchmarks are the price performance ones: the new ranges of Intel and AMD chips means that Oracle is now outperforming Microsoft in the low-end market as well as the high-end.

The point about the large system benchmarks is that they are the systems of the future. By 2010 Oracle predict there will be at least one 1 PetaByte database out there, at least one 1000 node RAC system and at least one system with 1 TeraByte of RAM. These huge systems are being driven by a number of different trends: government initiatives in healthcare and law enforcement; large internet retailers; and scientific projects in areas like genetic research and particle physics.

The challenge for Oracle is to make such huge resources work as well as smaller resources. For instance, we all know that disks are getting bigger but that their performance is not keeping up. We will soon have 1TB disks, which will be pretty much like tape drives. This is why table compression in 11g is so important. By compressing tables we effectively increase the performance of disks considerably (more data retrieved by each disk read). Furthermore the database can natively interpret the compressed data. Obviously there is a DML overhead but it is a fraction of the gains from improved reads. The problems inherent in backing up a 1PB database are obvious. This is why Oracle has written its own backup utility: the database can use its knowledge of its own state to only backup stuff that needs to be backed up. This can be a lot faster than blindly copying all the system files at the OS level.

It is also obvious why Oracle is still committed to per core licensing. The charges for a 1000 CPU cluster (Enterprise Edition plus RAC plus Partitioning plus all sorts of other 11g goodies) would add up to a hefty chunk of change.

In the Q&A somebody observed that Oracle's own cluster still uses Sun E25K and asked Juan when it is still appropriate to go for SMPs rather than blade clusters. Juan replied that it was a matter of comfort. SMP is a very mature technology but RAC is now mature; leading edge rather than bleeding edge. He did say that he didn't think Oracle would ever purchase another SMP ever again. Larry won't pay for them.

I bumped into Eddie Awad a couple of times yesterday and I kept asking him, "Are you Twittering this?" So at the OTN Night he pulled out his iPhone - Eddie just had to be an earlier adopter - and Twittered Dan Norris. Lo! a few minutes later Dan had located us outside the Jeopardy room. So it can be useful and I will stop being sceptical. OTN night was pretty much the same as last year, only with slightly fewer exotic dancing girls and the introduction of some people from the local D&D guild wandering about on stilts. I'm sure it made sense to somebody. Doug Burns introduced me to Kurt "DUDE" Van Meerbeck and his wife but it was really too noisy to have a proper conversation.

OOW2K7: First sessions

I'm afraid I skipped the opening keynote of the conference in favour of breakfast with Doug Burns and Dmitri Geilis. It was almost certainly more entertaining and more educational.

My first session of OpenWorld was Dr Paul Dorsey on the "Thick" database. That's thick as in full of business logic rather than stupid. Quite why it's not "rich" database like thin client vs rich client I don't know. Paul said his motivation was to annoy people, which was promising. Unfortunately the sort of people he wanted to annoy - OO programmers, J2EE and .NET middle tier evangelists and open source bigots - weren't in the audience. This is an Oracle conference, so pretty much everybody is going to be signed up at least to the idea of proprietary framework , and most of them will be in favour of putting most if not all the business logic in PL/SQL. Although, as he acidly observed, OTN has drunk the SOA Kool-Aid.

The point being that UI standards change far more often than the database does. So it is acually more important to be UI independent than database independent. He also said that ApEx is not - out of the box - a thick database implementation. It is a product and it is possible to build ApEx applications in a dumb fashion. However, the cost of being dumb in ApEx is less than being dumb in Java.

The second half of the presentation was devoted to an overview of techniques for building thick database APIs. This covered table() functions, Views with Instead-Of Triggers, PL/SQL collections and bulk operations. I'm afraid I found this a bit of a waste of time because surely this is all old hat? But apparently not. At least one person in the audience didn't know about bulk exception handling and so is obviously not using FORALL statements.

Funnily enough, the next session also dealt with building PL/SQL wrappers for SQL, but coming from a different angle. This was Steven Feuerstein, who was seeking to cure our addiction to writing SQL with his "code therapy". His basic arguement is that we should not proliferate SQL statements throughout our programs. Rather we should encapsulate SQL in reusable functions which have proper exception handling and well-structured naming conventions. We should think of SQL in PL/SQL functions as a service which is provided to the actual application code.

We should generate these functions because that's the only way to ensure that proper standards are enforced. Especially in naming conventions, which must be adhered to if the functions are to be reused. I would say that this presentation was an advertisement for the Quest CodeGen utility, except that they're giving it away for free. Steven had one phrase I really liked: deja vu coding. This is when we find ourselves coding the same thing we coded last week. That's a definite sign we have a piece of functionality we really ought to extract to an API for reuse. Of course, the OO crowd, especially the XP lot, have been banging this particular drum for years.

Following on from Steven was Bryn Llewellyn with his session on PL/SQL New Features in 11g. He kicked off with the fine grained dependency tracking: I'm not sure I would have started there, as it's not exactly the most exciting new feature. But I liked his explanation of why Oracle had the validation checking in the first place: it's in lieu of a make file. Real Native Compilation is much more interesting. Until 10g Oracle had "outsourced" the compilation to a C compiler on the OS, because it was easier for Oracle. Unfortunately many sites wouldn't install a C compiler on their production box, so they couldn't take advantage of the performance benefits. I currently work on such a system: the security policy forbids it. Yes this does mean our external C procs are probably sub-optimally compiled but you can't argue with the security policy. So this feature will be very useful to us.

There's also Intra-Unit inlining, which basically counteracts the performance of Feuerstein-approved modularity by duplicating the code from called functions at the compile stage. Result set caching has already been widely talked about. As Bryn says, "You can never have too many caches." His test cases went from ~1000 milliseconds to 0 milliseconds. But apparently not every query will improve by a factor of infinity. The results are guaranteed to be correct in every case but this means that the benefits of caching results may not always be high. Obviously there's a cost to invalidating the cache. What else? DBMS_SQL is here to stay, but only for Method 4 queries. That is when we don't know either the number of defines (selected columns) or the number of binds. For everything else we can now use EXECUTE IMMEDIATE. In case you're wondering, there is no Method 1, 2 or 3.

They are closing the internet village now, so it's time to sign off.

OOW2K7: What's the story?

The opening salvo in the OpenWorld 2007 campaign was the Sunday Night keynote. When I arrived at Moscone Center at 5:30 the queue for stretched around the block. Literally round the block. I'm sure I wasn't the only person asking whether we were all mad. At least it wasn't raining and at least we all got in. Actually it turned out to be a good thing to be one of the last people into Hall D, because it meant I had to sit through considerably less Billy Joel than the early birds must have had to endure.

Most of the event was devoted to Larry's account of the history of Oracle's thirty years. I'm sure he's told these stories a thousand times already but many of them were new to me. The best story was John Kemp, the first Chief Finance Officer, who used to deliver pizza to the Oracle offices but who was studying Accountancy at Berkley. Also the famous first sale to the CIA was for a product, Oracle version 2.0 (there was no version 1.0) which hadn't been written yet. How times have changed. Unfortunately the speech became less focused and eventually turned into a recitation of people who joined the company over the years.

The rest of the session consisted of some slightly desperate sketches from the cast of Saturday Night Live. There was also a worthy presentation on Oracle's global responsibility programme. There are a number of initiatives in the education arena (mainly encouraging schools and students to use Oracle software). Also, Oracle employees do lots of volunteering. The event was finished off by a pub rock band composed of Oracle employees and customers, fronted by the Senior Vice President for Alliances, playing a song about Oracle rocking for ever. The band was called Eardriver but I'm afraid Hallclearer would have been more appropriate.

Of course I had to leave anyway because of the ACEs' dinner. The Fly Trap is a nice place. I got to drink Pinot Noir from Francis Ford Coppola's vineyard and the food was good. The one problem with these occasions is that the restaurant layout prevents you circulating too much, so you end up talking to a handful of people. Eddie Awad asked my advice about user groups; I'm not sure I completely answered his question but it has stimulated some thoughts which I may blog later. Doug Burns was extremely jet-lagged; you may think that's a euphemism, I couldn't possibly comment. We all got issued with our new Oracle ACE fleeces, which are actually gilets with a large Ace of Spades symbol on the back. I don't know whether the ACE directors' fleeces have the tiara as well. Inevitably Mogens Norgaard wore his for the entire evening. Steven Feuerstein threatened me with a steak knife. These liberal peaceniks are all the same.

So, what is the story?

Is there a big theme? Beats me. One of the Oracle people I spoke to last night said they all don't know what's going on. If there is a big announcement it will be just as much of a surprise to the employees as to the rest of us. One of the ACE Directors who had spent the day in the Directors' briefing sessions said they had been told that there would be no mention of features currently under development. Apparently all that stuff is being saved up for next year's OpenWorld when Oracle are going to make a big deal out of 11gR2.

In the afternoon I was wondering through the Yerba Buena Gardens. A young chap on a bench clocked my OpenWorld pass. Jerking his head at the big tent which is blocking off Howard Street he asked me, "Do you know what the party's about?" "Oracle," I said. "Database software." He turned to his friends and told them, "Computer shit."

OOW2K7: It's raining today

Well actually it was raining yesterday, but Scott Walker didn't sing a song called that. In fact it's quite sunny right now but according to last night's weather forecast there are likely to be showers in the north Bay area throughout the week. The news anchors kept saying they needed the rain, like that's supposed to be a consolation. Still, at least this year we get to use the complimentary umbrella included in the conference bag.

I went out for a few beers with John Spencer last night. The bars were all pretty crowded. Turned out the two local college teams were playing that sport the Americans wrongheadedly call football. Guys, it's rugby league in fancy dress. Anyway, the Sam Adams followed by a visit to Lori's Diner kept me awake until the magic hour of 10'O clock. Unfortunately I woke up at 4:30AM this morning. Which is why I'm blogging this in an internet cafe at such a gosh-darned early hour.

I bumped into Wilfred van der Djeil in the lobby of the King George. He was still trying to get his demos working for his presentation tomorrow. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

My OOW2K7 schedule

The OpenWorld conference starts slowly this year. There is no Oracle Xtreme event to warm up the proceedings . Sunday does feature user group sessions, but I'm not a member of any of the groups so I'm not particularly interested. I think I shall most of Sunday acclimatising, perhaps with a trip to the SF Museum of Modern Art. They've got a major exhibition of Joseph Cornell's work on at the moment. I've only ever seen pictures of his work so I'm ridiculously excited about the prospect of seeing over 200 of his boxes. Also I need to do some shopping: does anybody know a place in SF where I can buy a Beckham LA Galaxy shirt for a six year old boy?

Here is my schedule. It starts strongly. The opening three sessions are from speakers whom I've heard and enjoyed before. The schedule peters out towards the end of the week but then on past experience so do I; it's better not to have too firm a plan.

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Sunday, 11 November 2007

5:45 PM - "Keynote: Sunday Night Live" : Moscone North - Hall D

I think I will try to make the opening keynote, as it might be the best chance to share oxygen with Larry. In previous years this event has tended to clash with the ACEs' dinner but this year the OTN team have rescheduled it.

7:30 PM - "ACEs' Dinner" : The Fly Trap Restaurant, 606 Folsom Street @ 2nd

Monday, 12 November 2007

11:00 AM - "'Thick Database' Techniques for Oracle Fusion Developers" : Hilton - Yosemite Room B

Dr Paul Dorsey combines a very deep understanding of database design and development with some strong opinions and a nice line in wit. A promising mixture.

12:30 PM - "Break Your Addiction to SQL!" : Hilton - Grand Ballroom A

Steven Feuerstein (Whom God Preserve) is another great presenter.

1.45 PM - "Oracle Database 11g PL/SQL" : Hilton - Grand Ballroom A

Last year I missed Bryn Llewellyn's talk on enhancements to PL/SQL in 11g. I'm not going to make the same mistake again.

3:15 PM - "Back-of-the-Envelope Database Storage Design" : Moscone South - 310

I don't know nearly enough about storage and the back of an envelope is my avourite design tool so this is an irresistible title.

4:45 PM - "Oracle Database 11g: Next-Generation Performance and Scalability" : Moscone South - 104

My current project (a data warehouse) is still on 9i (I know, I know, it's not my choice). Scalability is an issue, so I want to know if it's worth skipping 10g and going straight to 11. Insert your own Spinal Tap joke here.

7:30 PM - OTN Night : The Westin St. Francis, 335 Powell Street

Loud music, beer, Linux: something for everybody!

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

9:15 AM - Keynote Tom Kyte : Grand Ballroom B - Hilton

"Everyone’s favorite Q&A chief and Oracle expert" will be talking on How Do You Know What You Know.

10:45 AM - "Oracle Database 11g Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing" : Moscone South - 102

Gotta find out more about 11g.

12:000 PM - "Oracle Magazine lunch" : Lulu, 816 Folsom St

I hope to tear myself away in time to make the next session, but it rather depends how good the wine is.

1:45 PM - "Binary XML and XML Index: Scalable, Performant XML Processing for Schemaless XML" : Hilton - Continental Parlor 7 & 8

XML in databases is Teh Suck. On the other hand the pesky X-stuff isn't going away any time soon, so it will be useful to discover any better methods of handling it.

3:15 PM - "The Future Challenges of OLTP and Data Warehouse DBMSs" : Moscone South - 104

A theme is emerging.

4:45 PM - "Best Practices for Oracle Database Auditing" : Moscone West - 3005 - L3

With a bit of luck this presentation will provide a definitive answer for this chestnut of the OTN forums.

7:30 PM - The Oracle Bloggers' meeting : the Thirsty Bear Brewing Co, 661 Howard St

Once more the redoubtable Mark Rittman has organised this meeting. Nice one, Mark.

Wednesday, 14 November 2007

I'm intending to have a go at running an Unconference session today. So I have left lots of space in case a sore head prevents me being first to the whiteboard.

8:30 AM - Keynote, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems Inc. : Moscone North - Hall D

I just hope I can get through this without mentioning My Little Pony. Oops.

9:45 AM - "Current Trends in Database Performance" : Moscone South - 102

Um...Bigger, better, faster, by any chance???

12:45 AM - Keynotes, Michael Dell and Larry Ellison. : Moscone North - Hall D

Is it a good strategy to sit through Michael Dell's keynote in order to get a seat in the auditorium for Larry? Or does a wise man just decide to find a TV screen to watch and skip the need to carry an empty bottle?

4:30 PM - "Data Caching Application Deployment Use Cases for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database" : Moscone South - 309

People keep suggesting TimesTen as a possible solution to various problems but I really know almost nothing about it. So this is an opportunity to rectify this lamentable situation.

Thursday, 15 November 2007

11:30 AM - "Oracle Database 11g: Can I Do That? Introducing 11g SQL and PL/SQL Enhancements" : Marriott - Salon 9

A last chance to find out more about 11g.

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I'm staying in the King George Hotel. I know a few of the other ACEs and sundry bloggers are there too.

And here are my Connect details again. I'm not intending to take a laptop. As I'm not presenting I don't need one and I don't need the hassle of travelling with one. But I shall take advantage of the internet villages to keep in touch.

Here comes OOW2K7

Gosh, it's almost time for Open World 2007. Work has been somewhat random and stress-y over the last couple of weeks so I've not really been focused on the upcoming conference. This will be my fourth tour of OOW duty in five years. I have yet to get a handle on this one at all.

Last year the theme of the conference was just sheer size. Oracle had ramped up the scale of the conference to cope with all the acquisitions. The number of attendees went from 29,000 to 41,000. This year's projected attendance of 45,000 is a smaller increase (although it will still be mad).

In 2005 the theme was Fusion. There's recently been some upheaval in the Fusion programme, with slippage in both the scope and the delivery schedule, so it'll be interesting to see what the message will be. They'll have to say something. Let's hope senior executives are hot-pluggable too.

In 2003 the hype was all about 10g: The Grid Has Landed. Even though the actual software was still several months from delivery. Obviously there will be a lot of noise around 11g at this conference. The difference is the database has been available, at least in Linux flavours, for several months now. A large chunk of the audience will be in a position to rebut any wild assertions. So whilst there will undoubtedly be a lot of noise about the new software there will have to be less hyperbole. At least I hope so.

Jason Jones published some useful tips for OOW newbies. I think the key thing is to make the best use of the opportunities for personal contact. A lot of the conference resources will be available as downloads, podcasts, blog articles and whitepapers. So don't get hung up on attending presentations (although make sure you do go to some, just in case your boss asks). Instead, take advantage of the main thing which online can't offer: talking face to face with actual people. I think the evening events tend to be rather too crowded and noisy for networking. So look to some of the extra-mural daytime sessions, particularly the OTN Unconference and the No-Slide Zone which should provide useful arenas to engage with like-minded delegates.