Monthly Archives: May 2013

GLOC – Days 1 and 2

The conference was a great event. I learned about several new things, and now I have some homework to do to get further into the details. My favorite sessions were the 2 from Carlos Sierra on SQLT and Adaptive Cursor Sharing as well as Craig Shallahamer’s session on Child Cursors. It was great to hear exactly how child cursors and ACS works. I had looked at SQLT about 5 years ago, and amazed at how much has been added since. I will definitely be spending some time seeing what all it contains now, and will be posting what I find.

I had a great time catching up with people I haven’t seen in a while and making some new friends. Once again, the venue was awesome. I will definitely be back next year.

GLOC – Day 0

Arrived in Cleveland today for the Great Lakes Oracle Conference pre-conference workshops. I attended Craig Shallahamer‘s presentation on Oracle Performance. A lot of great information packed into 2 hours. More than anything, I like that from this quick presentation I was able to get a sense of how Craig does his performance troubleshooting. He clearly has a systematic methodology for finding the root cause of performance issues, and then works to understand why the issue is occurring. It appears to be a very scientific method approach.. observe, measure, hypothesize, experiment, repeat until you find the solution. Some of the things he presented on graphing performance metrics will be immediately applicable.. I just need to go figure out some of the math behind how it works 🙂

After the workshop, the NEOOUG was nice enough to have all the speakers attend Lola Bistro, the restaurant owned by Iron Chef Michael Symon). The food was delicious, and the company was even better. I got a chance to talk more with Craig and his wife, meet CJ Date, and have some great conversation with Lyson Ludvic, Dhan Patel, and Rich Schoustra. Makes me very much look forward to getting the presentations started tomorrow.

SQL Patching

I have finally caught up on my backlog of blog posts I have been meaning to read, and am quite glad I did. One of the posts I ran across was by the Oracle Optimizer team about SQL Patching. This allows you to have Oracle apply a hint to a query without having to modify the query text. This is similar to what you would do with SQL Profiles or SQL Plan Management, however, where those specify the entire execution plan to use, SQL Patching allows you to just apply a hint and still give Oracle the flexibility to adapt to changes. Very cool feature, and doesn’t require any additional tuning packs or anything, just 11g Enterprise Edition.

Read more about this undocumented (but supported) procedure in the following 2 articles:

https://blogs.oracle.com/optimizer/entry/how_can_i_hint_a
https://blogs.oracle.com/optimizer/entry/additional_information_on_sql_patches