HAWCS v4.3 Release

We are pleased to announce a new release of the Hotsos Application Workload Characterization Solution (HAWCS) for Oracle Ebusiness Suite (EBS). HAWCS gathers the performance metrics you need to discover where your system resources are going. Armed with these metrics, you can quickly address the problem areas and maximize the effectiveness of your EBS performance.

This new release, v4.3, has the following features:

• Improved user and diagnostic messages regarding repository operations and possible errors
• Expansion of email capability to include a reply address
• Correction of the sorting order of collection dates in the Performance Trends graph on initial data collection
• Correction of an overflow condition in some of the displayed fields
• Improvements to display labels and sorting columns

Existing customers may obtain the new release from portal.hotsos.com. Potential customers who are interested in a free trial should contact sales@hotsos.com or call +1.817.488.6200 for more information.

Hotsos Plug-In for Allround Automations PL/SQL Developer

We are pleased to announce a new release of the Hotsos Plug-In for Allround Automations PL/SQL Developer. Best of all, this version comes free with the purchase of Hotsos Profiler.

Developers can now take control of performance diagnostics and tuning right from the PL/SQL Developer environment. Hotsos provides the tools needed to know what's happening in the Oracle database. This plug-in harnesses the power of Hotsos Profiler right on the developer's desktop. Execute a batch of SQL or PL/SQL commands and immediately view a profile of the server-generated trace file.

Existing Profiler customers may download the Hotsos Plug-In from the Hotsos portal.

More information about Hotsos Profiler and the Plug-In can be obtained by calling +1.817.488.6200 or sending an email to sales@hotsos.com.

Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight - Doug Gault

Doug Gault is returning to Hotsos Symposium 2012. Doug is an entertaining speaker who focuses on Oracle's Application Express. Doug Gault is a Director & Co-Founder at Sumneva, a world-class Oracle Application Express (APEX) consulting, training & solutions firm founded in 2010. He has been working with Oracle since 1988, starting with version 5.1B, SQL*Forms 2.0 and RPT/RPF. Since then he has focused his career on Oracle's development technologies, spending the last decade on web based technologies, and the last 5 years specifically on APEX. Prior to co-founding Sumneva, Gault was Vice President of Sumner Technologies, which also focused on Oracle APEX consulting, training & solutions. Before that he served as the Product Development Director for Hotsos Enterprises, during which time he was the lead architect/developer and product manager for two commercial products written in exclusively in APEX. His 21 years of Oracle experience has taken him all over the world and involved him in some truly ground-breaking projects. Gault has presented and participated in round table discussions at a number of conferences including Oracle OpenWorld, UKOUG and ODTUG's APEXposed. He holds an Associates Degree in Computer Science, and an honorary Master's Degree from The School of Hard Knocks, believing there is no replacement for hard earned experience.

Topic: Capturing Performance Data for Interesting APEX Processes

Description: One of the features of Oracle Application Express 4 is the much improved debug information now stored in the dictionary views. This data can be used to track, monitor, and identify performance trends across your APEX application. The trick is capturing instances of this information for interesting APEX processes programmatically. This session will introduce the idea of using APEX Debug data for performance trending, the techniques and information necessary for you to mine the Oracle Application Express 4 debug data, and methods for programmatically capturing runs deemed as "interesting".

If you're into ApEx, you won't want to miss Doug's presentation. Sign up today before the price goes up on Feb 11, 2012.

Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight - Doug Burns

Hotsos is very pleased to announce that Doug Burns is returning for Hotsos Symposium 2012! He has graciously accepted the spots formerly held by Randolf Geist, who had to cancel. While we will miss meeting Mr. Geist, we are very happy that Doug agreed to take his slots.

Doug Burns is an independent contractor who has 20 years of experience working with Oracle in a range of industries and applications. As well as presenting at a number of conferences, he has developed, taught, and edited performance-related courses for both Oracle UK and Learning Tree International. He is a member of The Oak Table Network and an Oracle Ace Director.

Doug's Topics: Statistics on Partitioned Objects 2012 and Falling in Love All Over Again ... OEM 12c Performance Page Enhancements

Descriptions of Sessions: Statistics on Partitioned Objects 2012 – Optimal SQL execution plans are rooted in the quality of the statistics describing the underlying objects that are used by the Cost Based Optimizer.

Statistics maintenance is a particular challenge on Data Warehouse systems holding large data volumes that support complex and flexible user reporting requirements. Such systems are likely to use partitioned tables and indexes to complicate the picture further.

Continuing the theme of last years presentation, the 2012 version will look at additional lessons learned during the past year and focuses on 11g features.

Review of Core Issues

• The quality/performance trade off
  
  • Global and Approximate Global statistics METHOD_OPT and Column Statistics
• Alternative Strategies
  
  • Copying statistics
  • Setting statistics
• 11g improvements
  
  • AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE
  • Incremental Statistics

The presentation will discuss a variety of problems and bugs with the various approaches that should be avoided as well as offering guidelines to help you design the best statistics collection strategy for your requirements.

Falling in Love All Over Again ... OEM 12c Performance Page Enhancements – Oracle 10g introduced significant instrumentation enhancements and the OEM 10g Performance Pages illustrated them to make performance analysis much easier. OEM 12c is the latest evolutionary stage of the Performance Pages and this presentation shows the new features that make them even more compelling and useful in more situations.

There are a few more seats available for Hotsos Symposium 2012, but you'll need to register soon! We don't want you to miss out on all these fabulous speakers. ;)

Hotsos Symposium 2012 Discussion Forum

Hotsos is pleased to announce that we have set up a discussion forum for each of the presentations for Hotsos Symposium 2012. Your questions will be answered by the speakers. The forum is moderated, and you will be required to create a login to participate.

To access the Hotsos Symposium 2012 Forum, please visit www.hotsos.com/forum.html. Create an id, and start entering your questions.

Comments or questions about this forum can be sent to support@hotsos.com. We hope that you will find value in this new offering.

Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight - Cary Millsap

The Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight is focusing on Cary Millsap this week. Cary is a returning speaker, and a co-founder of Hotsos and the Hotsos Symposium. Read more about him and his topic below. To view a list of the additional speakers, please visit the Hotsos Symposium Speaker page.

About Cary: Cary Millsap is an entrepreneur, software technology advisor, software developer, and Oracle software performance specialist. His technical papers are quoted in many Oracle books, in Wikipedia, in blogs all over the world, and in dozens of conference presentations each month. His blog is read by thousands of people each month. He has presented at hundreds of public and private events around the world. He wrote the book "Optimizing Oracle Performance" (O'Reilly 2003), for which he and co-author Jeff Holt were named Oracle Magazine's 2004 Authors of the Year. He is the founder and president of Method R Corporation (http://method-r.com), a company that creates frustration-free software that shows performance the way you've always wanted to see it. Cary is an Oracle Ace Director.

Cary's Topic: Instrumentation: Why You Should Bother

The Abstract: In our increasingly virtualized environments, it's ever more difficult to diagnose application defects — especially performance defects that affect response time or throughput expectations. Runtime diagnosis of defects can be an unbearably complicated problem to solve once the application is sealed up and put into production use. But having excellent runtime diagnostics is surprisingly easy if you design the diagnostic features into the application from its inception, as it is being grown, like you would with any other desired application feature.

There are still a few seats open so be sure to register soon!

Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight - Christian Antognini

The Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight is focusing on Christian Antognini this week. Christian is a returning speaker, and his sessions are always engaging. We think you'll find his topic and abstract especially interesting. Read more about him and his topic below. To view a list of the additional speakers, please go to the Speaker page.

Topic: Shareable Cursors

Abstract: The result of a parse operation is a parent cursor and a child cursor stored in the library cache. Obviously, the aim of storing them in a shared memory area is to allow their reutilization and thereby avoid hard parses. But when can they be reused?

The aim of this presentation is not only to discuss what parent and child cursors are but also, and foremost, to examine in what situations it is possible to reuse them. In doing so, topics such as bind variable peeking, bind variable graduation, adaptive cursor sharing and cardinality feedback will be covered as well.

About Christian: Since 1995, Christian Antognini has focused on understanding how the Oracle database engine works. His main interests include logical and physical database design, the integration of databases with Java applications, the query optimizer and basically everything else related to application performance management and optimization. He is currently working as a senior principal consultant and trainer at Trivadis in Zürich, Switzerland.

If Christian is not helping one of his customers get the most out of Oracle, he is somewhere lecturing on application performance management or new Oracle Database features for developers. In addition to classes and seminars organized by Trivadis, he regularly presents at conferences and user-group meetings. He is a proud member of the OakTable Network.

Christian is the author of the book Troubleshooting Oracle Performance (Apress, 2008).