Carlos Sierra's Tools and Tips

Today is the 3rd and last day of the Hotsos Symposium 2013. I will stay the extra day so I can attend Maria Colgan’s 1-day class. I am delighted to be here. This annual event is awesome. I will certainly apply to speak next year!

In my opinion, most sessions have been of good quality. Topics are interesting, and having 2 sessions at the same time allows me to pick one out of two instead of many. Of course there are times where I would like to attend the two!

Since this is my second year, I feel like coming back home. I know more people than last year, including other speakers. My kudos to Hotsos for keeping up with the quality of this event.

I would love to see more Oracle attendees, specially Support managers so they can better sense what the Oracle community needs… Anyways, I am happy to see some Oracle faces here… Since many of us work from home these days, participating in events like this helps to reestablish relationships, that would otherwise fade over time.

Yesterday, we paid a visit to Enkitec‘s offices. Veronica showed us the office and we ate some pizza there. The office is modern, stylish and cool. It invites to work! One thing I noticed is the natural synergy among employees. I find this intimate networking of smart guys so important to achieve better results. It encourages constant collaboration and kind of explains me the success of this firm. It brought to my memory my first years at Oracle, when we used to gathered in the aisles and talk about anything, including work! Anyways, it was nice to go and visit…

My to-do list after this Symposium grows:

1. I noticed some misconceptions about statistics gathering. I have to chase down some Metalink notes which are causing this trouble…
2. Without knowing it, some speakers have created some “enhancement requests” to SQLT, so I have to incorporate some of these soon…
3. I need to review some SQL tuning complex cases that some participants want to discuss with me. I will review and provide some advice…
4. I expect to receive some emails with enhancements to either the CBO or the database. I will log them to corresponding groups…
5. Oracle Support would benefit of some refreshment in “diagnostics collection” for SQL tuning issues. That means another round of internal training. Maybe short remote sessions…
6. I have a list of at least half a dozen topics that could be of interest for future conferences. I need to polish this list and draft some abstracts. Then I will review with some OUG’s key players to sense interest.
7. I need to purchase (and read) like 3-4 books.
8. I need to evaluate the possibility of writing a new tool. It would be a holistic review of CBO statistics (including schema, system, data dictionary and fixed objects). The tool would perform many health-checks and return a set of observations. A natural component could be the dynamic generation of a second script to actually implement those observations. Statistics is still a hot issue and I noticed very diverse opinions. Some are good and some are simply wrong.
9. We need to investigate if “STATISTICS_LEVEL to ALL” can be improved in terms of performance in EXADATA.
10. I need to learn STRACE and determine its real value for Support. Then review existing Metalink notes and update them accordingly.
11. Big data and fussy data mining seem to be hot. Performance of data mining may become a concern… I have to research.
12. Method-R and Delphix have excellent products. I need to learn more about them since I expect their adoption by the Oracle community will make them more visible to all of us. I may write a Metalink note on the former so Support can make better sense of it.
13. I have to document in this Blog more about the many ramifications of SQLT, specially in the area of Plan Stability and Plan Migration. It seems to be an eternal concern. SQLT provides a lot of help in this area but I think we need better explanations on how to exploit these capabilities.

Ok. Time for a coffee and my daily email race… So far, email is winning by far…