Nice surprise...

Imagine that, a bit over a week ago I walk out of the office building and am surprised by this view:


Turns out I stumbled into the 2008 Porsche Parade! That was a nice surprise. The weather wasn't too bad either, so it made for a nice afternoon stroll. Along with a few other people...


If you happen to like old school Porsche's, there were a few of those too:


The judges took their job seriously, they really checked all the nooks and crannies of the cars:



I was told there were around one thousand Porsches in town...

A recent email from a former student

I heard from Ken Deutschmann of Anheuser Busch and he made my day knowing he'd used knowledge and techniques from the Optimizing Oracle SQL, Intensive class. Here's what he had to say.

"I had always considered myself a decent query tuner/writer. But, I will have to say that I did pick up some nice little tidbits that I have been making use of - like using GROUP BY's in subqueries to force no rewrites, etc. One case I did today was to drop a query from 3.5MM I/O's down to 20K with just such a change. Knowing more about the 10046 trace output is very helpful. I have been helping my main application group in tuning their stuff, most often droping run times in half or better. "

Right on Ken, you go brother!!!

Collaborate Tradition

Back in 2005, I attended the IOUG-A show in Toronto. James Thomson, a good friend from Canada, and I wanted to attend the hockey playoff game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Carolina Hurricanes. The tickets were extremely expensive so we set off to watch the game over dinner and a beer.

While walking to a sports bar between the 1st and 2nd period, we passed a ticket scalper still trying to unload the last two tickets he had. Long story short, we were in our seats before the puck dropped for about 10% of the pre-game price.
This is turning into a bit of a tradition now.

During my recent visit to Collaborate in Denver, my friends at PIOCON invited some of the Hotsos team to join them at the Pepsi Center to watch Colorado play Minnesota. It was a great game with the home team winning somewhat easily.

Many thanks to Matt Vranicar and Eric Camplin for the invite and a great time - we owe you one!

Recent Brazil Visit

I had the opportunity to visit Brazil last week to meet with our reseller firm Teor. I was also speaking at a Dell Performnace Summit in Porto Alegre and the ENPO-BR event in Sao Paulo. Both events were well organized and enjoyed strong attendance.

It was an amazing visit although it seems we were eating Brazilian BBQ non-stop for my entire stay.
I was also able to attend a local Palmeiras soccer game. There is considerable passion surround soccer in Brazil with amazing loyalty to specific clubs. I was almost denied entry into the hotel gym based on wearing the wrong soccer club jersey :-)

If you ever get the opportunity, I would definitely recommend visiting this great country.

SYM 2008

Another excellent symposium has come to an end. The speakers were great as always and Tom Kyte had a great training day to top everything off. Tuesday night was the party where the theme was "Bike Night"! What a hoot that was. Here I am in my get up. Some folks claim that I was a wild man on the dance floor, we'll have to see if there is any photographic evidence to back up these outlandish claims.

Make sure you make plans for next year. I don't think the dates are set just yet but plan on about this time next year.


(Behind me is Mike E. and Elise B.)

Ora-600 [Qctvco:Csform]

At one recent engagement we ran into a problem with queries against some views running slow. The CBO didn't use complex view merging because this was turned off due to a 10G bug. This bug is documented in Metalink note 437376.1: “A query involving inline subqueries from mulitple tables whose columns are encrypted using Transparent Data Encryption [TDE] results in ORA-600 [qctVCO:csform]”. The Oracle recommended workaround, turn off complex view merging, had been implemented (_complex_view_merging=false) at this site.
We resolved this by turning back on complex view merging, and targeting the views suffering from this bug one by one. We added the /*+ no_merge */ hint to the view definition. Now most queries ran fast again, and the queries on the views suffering from the bug didn't fail with ora-00600.

And this week Ric is in....

Quite a change from Atlanta. They tell me the week before I got here it was rather nice, but the snow and cold arrived just in time for me. Humm there seems to be a pattern going on here... This a shot from the classroom facility. Very flat here, you can see for a very long distance. As a hint they have a very large mall here, at one time the largest in the world I'm told.