Hotsos Symposium 2012 Scrapbook

The scrapbook for last year's Hotsos Symposium is now available for your viewing pleasure:

Click here to view this photo book larger

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Hotsos Training Day 2013

Maria Colgan will host the optional Training Day 2013 on March 7, 2013. She is a Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle Corporation, and her core responsibilities are Data Warehouse Best Practices and the Oracle Optimizer.

Maria's topic is entitled Oracle Optimizer One Day Workshop. Since the optimizer's introduction in Oracle 7, we have been fascinated and intimidated by the Cost-Based Optimizer (CBO) and the statistics it relies on. It has long been felt that the internals of the Optimizer are shrouded in mystery and a degree in wizardy is required to make it do the right thing. This one-day workshop will explain the fundamentals of the CBO and the statistics that feed it, as well as provide a methodology for diagnosing and resolving SQL execution performance problems.

To sign up for Maria's workshop, visit registration today!

Hotsos Symposium 2013 Presenters Announced

The presenters for Hotsos Symposium 2013 have been selected, and the complete listing may be found at www.hotsos.com. We have many returning speakers including Tom Kyte, Cary Millsap, Alex Gorbachev, Andy Zitelli, Carlos Sierra, Gerwin Hendriksen, Gwen Shapira, Iordan Iotzov, Karen Morton, Kerry Osborne, Kyle Hailey, Kyle Towle, Marco Gralike, Margaret Norman, Maria Colgan, Mark Farnham, Neil Gunther, Paul Matuszyk, Shan Nawaz, Stephan Haisley, Steven Feuerstein, Tim Gorman and Toon Koppelaars.

New presenters include: Abel Macias, Bruce Ernst, Felix Castillo, Frits Hoogland, George Srdanov, Jacco Landlust, John Clarke, John Hurley, Kellyn Pot'Vin, Sarah Brydon (with Kyle Towle), Mauro Pagano, and Noelle Stimely.

You won't want to miss Hotsos Symposium 2013, or the optional Training Day with Maria Colgan.

Hotsos now has two ways to register: onsite and virtual. Go to registration today to find out more and sign up!

Hotsos HAWCS v4.3.1 Released Today

Hotsos Application Workload Characterization Solution (HAWCS) v4.3.1 for Oracle E-Business Suite has been released today. This release contains the following enhancements and fixes:

• Split the online Main Dashboard “Top 5 EBS/Non-EBS sessions” into two reports, called “Top 5 EBS sessions” and “Top 5 Non-EBS sessions”.
• Eliminated the filtering restrictions which had been placed upon the report of “EBS-Other” sessions. This filtering caused certain module names to not be reported in the online report.
• Corrected an occasional inaccuracy that occurred in the online Dashboard report “Top 5 EBS/Non-EBS sessions”. Under certain conditions, some sessions would not be reported properly.
• Corrected a reporting error in the “EBS Database Growth” screen (“EBS Health Check” in the “Admin” tab) in the online HAWCS screens, wherein more than one data collection in a 24-hour period would cause a sudden doubling of the “database size” reported.
• Enabled the “Scroll Bar” option in several “EBS Health Check” screens.
• Corrected the “Tablespace File Sizes” screen (“EBS Health Check” in the “Admin tab): the “Used” storage amounts and “Free” storage amounts were switched.
• Restored the ability to sort by the COUNT column in the report on the “History of Selected Work Product” screen. (Navigate from “Factory Model” to “Work Products” to any Work Product.)

For more information about HAWCS or for a free demo, please contact sales@hotsos.com, or call us at +1.817.488.6200.

Call for Papers Open for Hotsos Symposium 2013

You are invited to submit an abstract for consideration as a speaker to the eleventh annual Hotsos Symposium in 2013. You get free admission to Symposium and the optional Training Day. What a deal for spending 45 minutes discussing your favorite Oracle performance-related topic with your peers?!!

The deadline for submission is Friday, September 28, 2012.

Speakers will be notified in early November, 2012.

Find the submission form on our Call for Presentations page.

If you have any questions or difficulties, please send an email to symposium@hotsos.com.

We can't wait to see you in 2013!

Hotsos Symposium 2013 Registration Is Open

Registration is now open for Hotsos Symposium 2013 and the optional Training Day with Maria Colgan.  Visit www.hotsos.com to sign up and take advantage of super early bird pricing before September 30, 2012.

We've kept the same pricing structure as last year (including the hotel bundle), and we've added a companion option.  For an additional amount, your companion can join you for breakfast/lunch and the Tuesday night party.

Hotsos Symposium 2013 will be held March 3-7 at the Omni Mandalay Hotel in Las Colinas (Irving), TX.  It's just a short cab ride away from DFW and Love Field airports.

We hope to see you in March!

Profiler v5.2.7 Released

Profiler v5.2.7 has been released, and the Profiler Plug-In for PL/SQL Developer as well as the Profiler Extension for SQL Developer have been updated.

The new version of Profiler now includes the name of the XHTML output file. It also includes improved error and warning logging within the .log file. Profiler now references the Oracle SQL id values for input files that contain such information. A new "Profiled" column in the user interface bottom panel allows you to sort profile runs by the time at which each profile report was created. The user guide has been expanded.

Existing customers may download the new version of Profiler from portal.hotsos.com. The Profiler Plug-In and Profiler Extension are available at portal.hotsos.com, also. Just look for the appropriate link on the left side of the page.

For more information about Profiler, please contact Sales at 817.488.6200 or via email at sales@hotsos.com.

We are pleased to announce that Caren Hust won the Hotsos ipad at Collaborate 2012. Thank you to everyone who stopped by!

We hope to see you again at Oracle OpenWorld.

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).

Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight - Carlos Sierra

Biography: Carlos has collaborated with Oracle Support since 1996. During this time, he has rotated through several groups including: EBS Manufacturing, Field Support, EBS Center of Expertise COE and for the past 5 years Server Technologies COE.

Carlos is the author of SQLTXPLAIN. A tool that is becoming the preferred choice by Oracle Support and Development to analyze and diagnose SQL statements performing poorly. This tool has been his main contribution to Oracle and the community for the past 10 years.

Carlos has been a speaker in regional Oracle user's groups in Florida. He has delivered several WebCasts about SQLTXPLAIN to Oracle's customers. He has developed two advanced Oracle internal workshops in the area of SQL Tuning and delivers them all over the world.

Carlos has made SQL Tuning his daily job and cherished hobby. He is always willing to help others when they need a second pair of eyes to review an issue in the area of SQL Tuning.

Presentation Title and Abstract: How to Creat in 5 Minutes a SQL Tuning Test Case using SQLTXPLAIN

Creating a reproducible Test Case is frequently a necessary step to progress a SQL Tuning issue. Oracle Support requires this all the time.

A Test Case needs the metadata to re-create the schema objects accessed by the SQL statement. It also requires the CBO schema object statistics. The CBO system statistics may be also needed. The entire CBO environment is a must (Parameters and Fix Control). Specific CBO Parameters set at the time the SQL was parsed are needed. The values of the bind variables at the time the SQL was parsed are also needed. Other elements may be required like Constrains and Policies.

Putting together a Test Case is not an easy task. The good news is that every time you use SQLTXPLAIN on any of its main methods (XTRACT, XECUTE, XTRXEC and XPLAIN) a Test Case is assembled and included within the output of SQLT. So, when you send to Oracle Support a SQLT ZIP file it includes such Test Case.

During this presentation, you will learn how to implement a SQLT Test Case as Oracle Support does. You can benefit from this functionality by easily creating a Test Case from your Production environment into your Test system. There you can apply some "what if" tests or reduce your TC in order to simplify it. You can even create a Test Case out of another Test Case. Being able to easily "copy" the tuning environment for a particular SQL from Production into Test is very desirable if you or your team perform in-house SQL Tuning.

Now...don't you want to sign up for Hotsos Symposium 2012? If Carlos' presentation doesn't tempt you, you may want to take a peek at our Speaker page at www.hotsos.com to see if any other's do. You won't find another conference completely dedicated to Oracle performance optimization. To sign up, please visit Registration. We hope to see you in March!

Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight - Bryn Llewellyn

The Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight is focusing on Bryn Llewellyn this week. We think you'll find his topic and abstract interesting. Visit registration to sign up. To view a list of the additional speakers, please go to the Speaker page.

About Bryn: Bryn has worked in the software field for 30 years. He joined Oracle UK in 1990, at the European Development Center, to work in the Oracle Designer team. He transferred to the Oracle Text team and then into Consulting as the Text specialist for Europe. He relocated to Redwood Shores in 1996 to join the Oracle Text Technical Marketing Group. He has been the Product Manager for PL/SQL since 2001.

It's hard for Bryn to remember his life before Oracle. He started off doing image analysis and pattern recognition at Oxford University (programming in FORTRAN!) and then worked in Oslo, first at the Norwegian Computing Center and then and in a startup. In Norway, Bryn programmed in Simula (its inventors were his close colleagues). This language is recognized the first object-oriented programming language and was the inspiration for Smalltalk and C++.

Bryn's Presentation: Implement Extensible In-Database Analytics by Programming Map Reduce in PL/SQL

The Abstract: The MapReduce programming model lets developers without experience with parallel and distributed systems utilize the resources of a large, multi-CPU system. Hadoop clusters can be used to implement this model; but Oracle Database also provides mechanisms to support the same model – and with less programming. SQL's analytic capabilities are more powerful than many experienced programmers suspect; but detecting complex patterns within suitably characterized, independent subsets of the complete data set sometimes needs user-written procedural code. Enter in-database MapReduce: pipelined PL/SQL table functions declaratively specify, with a few keywords, how parallel query should do the "map"; then the procedural body does the "reduce".

Bryn addresses ways to implement an application to solve a specific problem where, because of the typically huge volumes of data that must be distilled down to provide interesting information, performance matters. A person whose job it is to work with an installed system, won't be able to use what he explains in his talk to tune its performance.

Now...are you ready to sign up??? Go to registration for more information and to register. Hope to see you in March!

Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight - Baron Schwartz

The Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight is focusing on Baron Schwartz this week. We think you'll find his topic and abstract interesting. If you have not signed up for Symposium yet, you'll want to do so by December 31, 2011 to take advantage of discounted registration pricing. Visit registration to sign up. To view a list of the additional speakers, please go to the Speaker page.

Baron Schwartz is the Chief Performance Architect at Percona. He is the lead author of High Performance MySQL, and creator of Maatkit and other open-source tools for MySQL database administration. He is an Oracle ACE, and has spoken internationally on performance and scalability analysis and modeling for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and on system performance in general.

Presentation Title: Measuring and Forecasting Scalability and Performance form Network Traffic

Abstract: TCP network traffic is a good lightweight way to analyze and model system performance and scalability. This talk demonstrates a variety of performance and scalability analysis techniques on a single sample of TCP packet headers from a production database. No packet payload is necessary; the analysis relies exclusively on correlating inbound and outbound packets and their arrival times. This makes it practical to gather data from nearly any system with a call-and-response TCP protocol, such as the Oracle database or an HTTP web server. Packet headers are not regarded as privileged data in most organizations, which helps avoid red tape.

The talk demonstrates two techniques: time-series analysis of the data to determine whether there are performance problems or opportunities in the server.s behavior, and using the data as input to Neil Gunther's Universal Scalability Law to forecast both scalability and performance at load levels beyond what is measured. Both techniques are accomplished with readily-available open-source tools, including some authored by the presenter. The emphasis is on achieving practical results, not on deep mathematical explanations. The techniques demonstrated can help practitioners assess a server without great expenditures of time and effort.

We hope to see you at Symposium!

Hotsos Laredo 4.2.0.0 Released

Hotsos is pleased to announce a new release of Laredo this week. For existing customers, Laredo 4.2.0.0 can be obtained from: https://portal.hotsos.com/products/Laredo/releases.

This version adds support for Windows 7 and the ability to select which Oracle home to use on systems where multiple homes exist.

If you are upgrading from a prior version, please uninstall it before installing version 4.2.0.0.

Laredo is a great tool to help analyze the performance impact of Oracle database changes before they’re put into production. Use Laredo to review schema, Oracle parameter, and statistics changes as well as upgrades.

To find out more about Laredo or for a demo, contact Sales at +1.817.488.6200, option 2 or by email at sales@hotsos.com.

Hotsos Symposium 2012 Speaker Spotlight - Andy Zitelli

Hotsos Symposium 2012 will be held March 4-8, 2012 in Irving, TX. There will be 31 speakers and 36 sessions dedicated to Oracle performance. Where else can you get this kind of in-depth discussion dedicated to Oracle performance? Plus, Jonathan Lewis is hosting the optional Training Day. Register today! You don't want to miss the 10th anniversary of Hotsos Symposium.

Title: Is Oracle 10046 Tracing Still Relevant?

Abstract: Oracle databases include instrumentation which provides a detailed chronological accounting of activities inside individual database sessions. Commonly referred to as 10046 tracing, this instrumentation has been used as a powerful tool for Oracle performance problem diagnosis and software debugging since the late 1990's. In recent years, Oracle has released other diagnostic tools, which collect a broad range of details regarding runtime activities throughout a database. Tools like ASH, AWR, V$ performance views and Oracle Enterprise Manager automatically collect and expose a wide range of runtime measurements. A commonly asked question is whether these more recent tools have replaced 10046 tracing?

This presentation will describe the differences between the details provided by 10046 tracing and those provided by Oracle's other tools. It will show why 10046 trace data is fundamentally different than the data provided by any of Oracle's other diagnostic tools. One of the key differences is between the methods used for data collection. 10046 trace data collects details based on state changes within individual database sessions. Other tools provide summarized data based on periodic sampling. Sampled results are good enough for investigating many problems but can be prone to significant omissions and inaccuracies.

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 20 years working with Oracle. He holds MS and BA degrees in Computer Science.

Andy has previously presented at Hotsos Symposia in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, as well as other recent conferences in California, Texas and Michigan. Andy is a member of the OakTable Network.

Don't miss it!