Day 2
Just finished Day 2 of Hotsos Symposium presentations. It has been a great event so far, like always with great content. My presentation was today as well. The room was packed (due to the topic, not the speaker 😉 … SQL tuning always pulls a crowd), so thanks to everyone who came, and hopefully people were able to walk away from it with a couple useful things. I guess we will find out when the evaluations come out 🙂 If you did attend, please fill out the evaluations and include what I can do to improve this particular presentation or just my presentation style in general. A huge thanks to Rhonda and the rest of the folks helping to run the event for doing an excellent job. There have been some slight hiccups that were out of their control, and they handled them wonderfully.
Today Luca Canali and Kellyn Pot’Vin definitely gave me some homework to do downloading their scripts and playing around. Kellyn’s was on ASH / AWR and included some very intriguing scripts against ASH data. Luca’s included great examples of how a heatmap can be used to show histograms over time, and he has some scripts for reporting latency events this way which I will definitely be looking over. He also mentioned Kevin Closson’s SLOB tool, which I need to give some time to as well.. The other talks I went to were also very good, but about 12c, so I will need to revisit them later this year once I have more exposure on 12c. Unfortunately I missed Rusty Schmidt’s presentation on analyzing Oracle Workflow, but he got the bad luck of getting assigned at the same time as Tanel Poder, and I have a have a rule that if Tanel speaks, I listen 🙂
Day 1
Unfortunately, I arrived late (which I will cover in a bit), so missed out on Maria Colgan’s keynote and Kerry Osborne’s 1st presentation, which I am very bummed about. I did pick up some great things about compression from Tim Gorman and am very intrigued with the new 12c In-Database Archiving feature that Julian Dontcheff mentioned. Jon Hurley did a great job explaining about the Shared Pool and how it can be monitored to prevent disaster. He also plugged the upcoming Great Lakes Oracle Conference in Cleveland in May, which is always an excellent event and I can’t wait to attend again.
Day 0
I arrived late because I had quite the adventure with my flights. Both Dallas and the Midwest both got snow on Sunday, which made airlines start cancelling flights like it was giving them free money. Which is mostly because cancelling flights is like giving them free money… They don’t use gas for the flights when they are cancelled and it isn’t like they add new flights or change flights to use bigger planes to try to accommodate people and get them to their destination as soon as possible. No.. they just shove people onto existing flights no matter how much later that happens to be. Pretty crazy there isn’t more of a fuss about this, but I guess we are just used to airlines treating us however they want. So my original flight from Columbus was cancelled. Which the kind folks at American Airlines didn’t even bother to tell me about. I got a google alert that my flight was cancelled. There is no easy way to reschedule my flight, so I tried to call their reservations area. 2+ hour wait time. Not helpful. So off to the airport to do this in person. 2.5 hours after the google alert came in, as I was walking up to talk to ticket agent at airport I finally got an automated phone call from AA saying my flight was cancelled. Thanks for the prompt notice. At the airport, they tried to re-book me onto a Monday evening flight. I didn’t want to miss any of the conference, and since I was presenting I was supposed to be in on Sunday to test out the laptop with their equipment and make sure everything was working, so I wanted to get in as soon as I could. Sunday still if at all possible. After the ticket agent checked everything they could, the best they could do was fly out at 6am on Monday into New York and get to Dallas at around 1pm Monday. I wanted to do better. They told me Cincinnati was still flying out Sunday night and had space on their 7:55pm flight that would get me in at 9:30pm. Great.. book it. So now we drive 3 hours through the snowy roads to Cinci. After we sit in the airport for about 4 hours, we get some good news. Around 5:30 a flight leaves Cinci for Dallas. So the flights are still on. Until around 6:15pm. That is when they announced that our flight had been cancelled. This time not for weather. I guess someone on the crew decided not to show up. Yay! And now since it was so late in the evening, they couldn’t even book us on a flight for Monday from Columbus or Cinci due to everyone else already rescheduling. Ugggh.. Their best option? They have a flight leaving from Indy at 8:50am, getting in at 10:10am. Since it wasn’t weather related, they will pay for our hotel in Indy, but we need to go to the Indy airport that night and talk to the agents there to get it arranged. Back on the road. 3+ more hours through the snowy roads. Arrive at the Indy airport after 10pm to find nobody there from AA. Of course. Call the number.. 2+ hour wait. So we get our own hotel and then catch the flight in the morning. So 24 hours after we left the house and 3 states (Cinci airport is in Kentucky) later, we finally get into the air. Luckily nothing else went wrong and I got to the conference around 11:30am, but it does mean I will get to have some “pleasant” conversations with the AA representatives when I get back. 🙂