Hotsos Symposium 2011 Speaker Spotlight - Doug Burns

Presentation Title: Statistics on Partitioned Objects

Presentation Abstract: 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.

This presentation is based on the problems encountered and solutions used during the implementation of several large DW systems running on Oracle 10.2 with different workload profiles and requirements and will discuss:

Core challenges and statistics fundamentals

• The quality/performance trade off


• Statistic levels on partitioned objects and how they are used


• Key DBMS_STATS parameters and defaults

Global Statistics

• Global and Approximate Global statistics


• Statistics aggregation scenarios and pitfalls

Alternative Strategies

• Setting statistics


• Copying statistics


• Dynamic Sampling

11g improvements

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.

Biography: 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. Doug is an Oracle Ace Director.

If you haven't signed up for Hotsos Symposium 2011 yet, visit out speaker list to see who will be here. You won't want to miss Sym this year!

If you have registered yet, spots are going fast! Sign up today!

Special Interest Group Meetings at Hotsos Symposium 2011

There will be two Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings on Sunday afternoon, March 6, 2011 before Hotsos Symposium 2011 kicks off. Both of these sessions are free and open to the general public as well as attendees. They're held in one of the meeting rooms at the Omni Mandalay Hotel in Irving, TX, and signs pointing to the locations of the meetings will be posted.

The first session is the OAUG DB SIG, which will meet from 1:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. The topic is "Tips and Tricks of Upgrading an E-Business Suite 11i Application Database Version from 10g R2 to 11g R2 (11.2.0.2) Version". This session will be presented by Kaberi Nayak and Mark Farnham. It will be a technical presentation for Oracle Apps DBA's or Oracle DBA's, who support the Oracle E-Business Suite Application.

The second session is the Hotsos SIG, which will meet from 3:15 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. This year, our presentation title is "Performance Is for the Birds". We will show you how our customers are able to reduce performance bottlenecks on their Oracle E-business system. Since we would also like to expand this technology to non-EBS systems, we will conduct a requirements discussion where you get to provide input on a future release of this application. Some of our popular Education classes have been updated, and Ric Van Dyke will briefly discuss.

More information about Hotsos Symposium 2011 and Training Day can be found at our website.

We hope to see you there!

Hotsos Symposium 2011 Speaker Spotlight - Dan Fink

Presentation Title: Variance Analysis, Profiling and Trending Using ASH and AWR Data

Presentation Abstract: Active Session History (ASH) and Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) are two powerful tools to help an organization diagnose performance issues. Though each tool comes with custom reports, they provide a limited view and only show single points in time. Using the data automatically gathered, you can write custom reports to examine trending, create alerts for known issues, and track changes to your systems. Dan reviews the ASH and AWR data structures and some of the nuances for reporting before moving into generating reports for activity and event trending, creating custom alerts for unusual activity, and comparing performance in light of system changes.

Biography: Daniel Fink is a Senior Consultant/DBA with Arisant. He started as a DBA on Oracle 7.0.16 running Parallel Server on OpenVMS and has experience on major Unix platforms and releases up to 11G. He is a member of the OakTable network, BAAG, and BAARF. He has presented on a wide variety of Oracle performance and diagnosis topics, including Developing A Disciplined Approach to Diagnosis, Oracle Performance for Developers, and Tracing Logical I/O.

If you haven't signed up for Hotsos Symposium 2011 yet, visit our speaker list to see who will be here. You won't want to miss Sym this year!

To sign up, please visit our registration page.

We hope to see you in March!

Hotsos Symposium 2010 Scrapbook Now Available

We've finished the scrapbook for Hotsos Symposium 2010. Check it out here:

Click here to view this photo book larger

Hotsos Symposium 2011 Speaker Spotlight - Cary Millsap

Presentation Title: Thinking Clearly about Performance

Abstract:Creating high-performance as an attribute of complex software is an extremely difficult business for developers, technology administrators, architects, system analysts, and project managers. However, by understanding some fundamental principles, performance problem solving and prevention can be made far simpler and more reliable. This paper describes those principles, linking them together in a coherent journey covering the goals, the terms, the tools, and the decisions that you need to maximize your application's chance of having a long, productive, high-performance life. Examples in this paper touch upon Oracle experiences, but the scope of the paper is not restricted to Oracle products.

Biography: Cary Millsap is the founder and president of Method R Corporation. He is widely known in the Oracle community as a speaker, educator, consultant and writer. He is the author (with Jeff Holt) of Optimizing Oracle Performance (O'Reilly 2003). Cary is also co-author of Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table.

Cary is one of the former founding partners of Hotsos and worked at Oracle for ten years. In the early 1990s, Cary created Oracle's OFA Standard, which became the default configuration standard for Oracle software installations worldwide. Cary is also a woodworker who builds and repairs furniture in his own shop. Follow Cary's blog at carymillsap.blogspot.com. Cary is also an Oracle Ace Director.

If you haven't signed up for Hotsos Symposium 2011 yet, visit our speaker list to see who will be here. You won't want to miss Sym this year!

To sign up, please visit our registration page.

We hope to see you in March!

Training Day 2011 with Karen Morton

Are you curious about Karen Morton's Training Day topic? If so, check out her blog post for more information. She's going to turn you into a SQL magician.

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.