After having a good sleep I attended the first session in the morning from George Djerdj Srdanov with a presentation called “How to Get the Most Out of Your I/O Subsystem?”. George dived deep into the I/O subsystem, with the following important subjects:
- Different RAID configurations (Read and Write penalties)
- SSD usage
- SAN configuration
- Block alignment and recommendation
The presentation was good and triggered me to check some things at a customer I am currently working for. In the customer case the block alignment in regard of the online redolog files might be a point of investigation.
After the presentation from George, I attended a presentation of John Clarke with a presentation titled “Exadata Storage Indexes, Inside and Out”. In this presentation John showed how Exadata is dynamically creates indexes at Exadata level and how the queries benefit of these indexes. It was pretty cool to see in his demo’s how the indexes actually work and how the queries were executed faster. You can find more info on the subject at: http://www.oaktable.net/blog/when-exadata’s-storage-indexes-used
When looking at presentations as from John I always get a little jealous knowing I am not able to test the demos easy myself, simply due to the fact I can’t put my hands on an Exadata storage myself on the moment. The technology though is really cool and picking up knowledge about them is for me a great thing to do…
After the Exadata presentation it was time to attend the second presentation from Gwen Shapira titled “Building an Integrated Data Warehouse with Oracle Database and Hadoop”. This presentation was more the introduction to Hadoop, how Hadoop is working and how BIG data is getting more important for Oracle. Gwen had a very strong statement regarding the usage of Hadoop when it should be chosen above an Oracle database, it said as how I got it:
“Database server cpu’s are very expensive, due to the Oracle database licensing. So if your data is almost not mutated, you have to store very much (unstructured) data to search through and data availability is not very critical, the data is probably a very good candidate to store in Hadoop.”
The presentation further showed how Oracle can use Hadoop and how data can be exchanged between them. The presentation gave a very clear overview of the usage and possibilities of Hadoop. For me personal it is good to see Oracle making the connection with the BIG data world. On the long run I am sure Oracle has to do this to be able to stay a very big player in the future market. To read Gwen her vision, you can read: http://www.pythian.com/blog/hadoops-everywhere/
After the lunch break I had some doubts, which presentation I should attend. On one track there was Toon Koppelaars with his presentation titled “SQL Plan Management” and on the other track the presentation titled “Is Your Database Stressed? Load Testing for Peak Performance” from Noelle Stimely. I choose for the presentation from Noelle, because of the fact I will be able to see the presentation from Toon probably in the Netherlands.
The presentation from Noelle started a bit difficult due to some technical difficulties, according some of the attendees it had to do with some kind of curse of this room. I guess I was very lucky because I had my presentation in the same room without any trouble…. Anyway Noelle used an emergency laptop and further more “the bug” from Hotsos bugged her, like it had bugged me the night prior to my presentation.
Noelle was due to her laptop trouble not able to show the live demo of the load testing she wanted to show, but overall she did a good job by showing how a load test should look like and what important things are to consider and think about. She also discussed Oracle Real Application Testing (RAT) and what is important to know about it when used for testing. If you like to read more you can checkout an older presentation from Noelle here: http://www.nocoug.org/download/2012-08/Noelle_Stimely_Load_Testing_Presentation.pdf
After the presentation from Noelle I attended the presentation from Kerry Osborne titled “Adaptive Optimization”. The presentation showed a new feature of the still not released 12c database. Kerry had to be very careful what to tell and what not to tell to the audience, of course very closely watched by Maria Colgan and Tom Kyte. The feature involved “Adaptive Optimization” looks to be pretty cool. It basically checks at runtime if the calculated execution plan is not sub optimal and if so it can adapt by exchanging a NESTED LOOP join by a HASH join or the other way around.
It is always fun to get a presentation from Kerry because of his special way of presenting and interaction with the audience. When the 12c database version has been released more of his presentation material will be available.
After the presentation from Kerry the two rooms were consolidated to one big hall again and Maria Colgan gave her presentation titled “What to Expect from the Latest Version of the Oracle Optimizer”. Maria as being the Senior Principal Product Manager for the Oracle database optimizer presented some of the new optimizer features in 12c what was awesome to hear from the first hand. Because I also would be present the next day for the training day with Maria I enjoyed the moment…
After the presentation from Maria… I became a bit sad knowing the official Hotsos 2013 conference part was over…
Gary Goodman Founder/CEO from Hotsos thanked all the speakers and gave his farewell words to the attendees… Luckily the there was still a training day, so for me it was not the official farewell yet…
After this conference day I was invited by Cary Millsap to join them for a dinner. It was really great to get this invitation (Thanks again Cary for the invitation!).
When we went to the restaurant Cary made a very true remark regarding Texas, when we saw some kind of bird, I guess a wild turkey. He remarked “In Texas everything is bigger, even the pigeons are”…. You can look for yourself, the so-called Texan pigeon….
At the restaurant it was quite awesome to have conversations with so many experts and at the same time enjoy the food and the drinks…
After this great evening, this concluded an awesome third, but official last day of Hotsos 2013….