Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Hotsos Symposium 2011 Speaker Spotlight - Andy Zitelli


Presentation Title: Five Things Every Programmer (and DBA) Should Know about Oracle


Abstract: One idea being widely propounded among many software developers is that software should be allowed to freely access data without any regard for how or where the data is stored. Although this idea sounds appealing, it frequently fails in practice. Software applications which treat data storage as a "black box" often suffer from widespread problems with performance, contention, and high resource consumption. These problems can be particularly acute when frameworks like Hibernate or Enterprise Java Beans are in use. Improper use of databases can increase the complexity of application code while degrading performance, limiting scalability and rendering multi-threading ineffective. Proper use of databases should simplify application design and support a high degree of concurrency across many users and applications.


This presentation will demonstrate several fallacies of the "black box" approach, using examples based on Oracle and other databases. The presentation will examine several key concepts regarding Oracle, which every software architect, developer and DBA using Oracle should understand. Topics will span several areas where developers and architects are prone to make mistakes. These will include problems related to Commits and Rollbacks, generation of unique identifiers, use of inefficient data types, locking mechanisms, data filtering and several other critical areas. The intent of the presentation is to help developers and DBA's avoid many common pitfalls arising from the "black box" approach to data storage.


Biography: Andrew Zitelli has over thirty years of experience as a software developer, data architect and performance analyst. He has served as a consultant to the aerospace, semiconductor, steel, and pharmaceutical industries. Andrew is proficient working with a broad range of operating systems and languages and has over 25 years experience working with ten different relational database products, including 18 years working with Oracle. He holds MS and BA degrees in Computer Science.


Andy is a previous presenter on Oracle performance topics at Hotsos Symposia in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. In 2010, he also presented at the Michigan OakTable Symposium (MOTS) and the Northern California Oracle User's Group (NoCOUG). Andrew is a member of the OakTable Network.

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