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.