Oracle 11g Data Warehousing Masterclass with Mark Rittman

Mark Rittman will be in Istanbul for a two days seminar this month(30 June-1 July), most probably I will be there and here is the details of this seminar.

What can be the purpose with “DBA 2.0″ synonym by Oracle?

Today Mr.Mughees A. Minhas, director of product development/database management was our guest at my company and he gave a presentation on “DBA 2.0″ idea. The presentation had three parts:
- Subjects related to how to sustain optimal performance with Oracle database,
- Subjects related to preserve order amid change with Oracle database,
- Subjects related to managing more with less with Oracle database

Lots of nice powerpoint slides related to extra cost options were discussed as usual :) One of my comments after the presentation was Oracle DBAs’ lives are getting much more complicated day by day and what Oracle marketing stuff is forcing IT managers to believe is completely the opposite, this is not fair just to sell more.

Change is of course inevitable and we are all somehow have to accept the changes which are managed by the guys at San Francisco head quarters, but in my opinion forcing management that if they migrate their DBA stuff to version 2.0 somehow everything will be easier and the stuff will be doing absolutely less is not accurate. For example with RAT DBA’s are now also testers, with ASM DBA’s are now storage admins right? Until now Oracle was able to automate easier parts like Memory, Undo, Segment Space management and they aggressively continue to come up with new features which need manual attention. But calling the older DBAs who are using Statspack not Grid Control or file system backup not RMAN as version 1.0, I believe this is not right.

ps: if until now you didn’t read it, here is the paper that started these kind of arguments in my organization: Performing a DBA 1.0 to DBA 2.0 Upgrade

Two Days Oracle Index Internals Seminar by Richard Foote

I have been following Richard’s blog for some time. So it was good to meet him in personal and join his seminar in Istanbul last week. But compared to my previous seminar notes I honestly need to say that I have been lazy this time, sorry.

When you hear the word Internals it is scary for some of us and not so practical for some others. Since I was familiar with the stuff from Richard’s blog the name was not so important for me, but I must mention that this seminar is much more beneficial for a starter to intermediate Oracle DBA profile so the naming can be perceived wrong.

It was long two days, 720 slides of pure Index topics within 10 sessions. But Richard is really a good presenter, with his jokes, up and down waving voice and body language he never let the class to go to a little sleep, even after a Turkish lunch. :)

I also wrote several Index related posts before, it was a good chance to ask Richard the question: Why Indexes? Not Tables, Clusters or Streams etc. His answer was, no specific reason. :) Marketing guys call this kind of a strategy as positioning, I like this very much: Volvo>Security, Lewis>Optimizer, Google>Simplicity, Dyke>RAC, Apple>Flexibility, Millsap>10046 etc. We may say if you have a seat on your mind for Oracle Indexes Richard wants to sit there, I guess.

Within two days Richard discussed on below topics:
- Introduction to Oracle Indexes,
- B-Tree Index Internals,
- Indexes and Statistics,
- Indexes and Constraints,
- Rebuilding Indexes(ironic chapter name for Richard right? :)
- Indexes and the Cost Based Optimizer,
- Indexing Tips, Tricks and Traps,
- Linguistic Indexes and Case-Insensitive Search,
- Other Index Structures like: Reverse Key, Function Based, IOT, Secondary Indexes on IOT, Invisable and Fake Indexes,
- Partitioned Indexes,
- Bitmap and Bitmap-Join Indexes

And here are my highlights from this seminar.

INFO: 2 Day Oracle Index Internals Seminar with Richard Foote at Istanbul

Richard Foote will be in Istanbul for a two days seminar next month. This is an important opportunity, so if you still didn’t you can book here.

Also you can visit here for a general outline of the seminar. As usual I will be publishing my seminar notes, until 13-14 November you can check the previous ones if you like of course. :)

Oracle Database 11g Roadshow and Release 2 Sneak Peek

After seeing Pawel’s post I also registered for the event. This three hours briefing was mostly about Oracle Database 11g and provided an opportunity for me to meet with Oracle server technologies vice president Mark Townsend, identify how we can be involved in the 11g Release 2 beta program and outline how we can participate in the marketing of our products and services at Oracle OpenWorld as a partner.

In order to attend you should be in one of below categories;

- Independent Software Vendors
- Systems Integrators
- Consultants, and Pre-sales Consultants
- Resellers

And below are the scheduled next stops;

May 19, 2008: Czech Republic, Prague
May 20, 2008: Poland, Kraków
May 21, 2008: Sweden, Stockholm
May 22, 2008: Spain, Madrid

My impressions is that Pawel was right about his expectations since it was mostly just another colorful Oracle powerpoint day. I tried to ask several questions and took the advantage of speaking to Mark and these were the seconds where we got some technical. Since I believe it can be not appropriate to talk about 11g R2 in details I will skip details of those parts of the event and share my remaining notes as usual;

Oracle Database 11g Roadshow and Release 2 Seminar Notes

For 11g R2 let me briefly mention that other than impressive fusion middleware new features we the database people will be living the new Grid 2.0 era, ASMing everywhere, single RACing to rule them all and edition based redefinition for minimum change impacts on applications ;)

Visit the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) portal

Oracle Database 11g

Optimizing Oracle by Desing – my impressions after Jonathan Lewis’s three days seminar

I have been working on Oracle databases for more than 10 years now. I started with version 7.3 at a local bank and with 8i I moved to the third largest Telco in Europe. If you do value, I also choosed to get certification. I have attended several educations, seminars, conferences, experienced lot of risky projects and weird problems. But my last three days experience was completely something different. Since my native language is not English and this post mostly will not be a technical one, it may get harder for me to express my feelings here.

For years I have been reading Jonathan Lewis’s articles, books, forum posts and of course after 2007 his blog. In my opinion he is a very special Oracle database expert, the reason why I think this way is not his deep knowledge about the technology but his willingness of sharing all his years of hard work and experiences every time with a very gentle way. Also Jonathan is one of the best teachers I experienced in my whole life. Nowadays it is getting harder to find someone having all this attributes together. IMHO some are very experienced but they do not care about sharing or some “huge mr.ego” experts try to beat people all around forums.

Jonathan’s experiences for all those years produced two important books for the community. But let me talk a little on the seminar book; A4 sized ~400 pages, each page supported with at least three or four paragraphs related to Jonathan’s previous on-site consultancy experiences, which you may not learn from documentation or any google search. These are all nasty things we experience during our daily lives, but Jonathan documented them so well that this course book’s content is like a best of summary of my all time best Oracle books. Even very advanced internals were explained with perfect simple powerpoint slides and supported with example scripts which are all provided in a CD.

Normally after a seminar I share my seminar notes(highlights, topics I liked most lets call), but after this kind of a knowledge storm this time I do not have the hearth for it. Instead I will be sharing the course topics briefly, the new questions I have now after the seminar and some hints you may find useful if you want to attend this seminar in the future.

Yes I have lots of new questions now, normally I love this kind of a feeling, having questions is always good for motivation. But this time I also feel some fear(this may not be the exact word to define, anyway), because Jonathan showed me that even on fundamental topics like redo or undo I still have lots of research to do. This is so normal I guess, because I am limited with the experience that I can get from the databases around me. When operational stuff takes lots of time there is no space for new experiences usually. So for sure I may say in consultancy market you get to learn and develop a lot. I admired Jonathan very much and I felt strongly that in near future I will love to accept its risk and quit to do much more dedicated research on Oracle database.

- Course table of contents
- Some hints you may like
- Lots of new questions I have (if you feel you know some answers please comment :)

Jonathan also uses some extreme examples on purpose from his past experiences, I believe to have and keep the interest all during his long sessions, this way of teaching is something I sympathized. Jonathan shared the SQL scripts to reproduce the outputs for our own databases which he might have tested on 9i or his laptop and shared the results.

I think Oracle community must feel very lucky to have some independent(non-Oracle employee) experts who are being honest, also mentioning the dark sides(bugs, don’t DOs) of this great software, advise to test in details, to be doubtful about so called “guru”s and each new feature for our own comfort. This is unique and precious in todays “marketing” world. For Jonathan’s efforts on developing this course I can not find the right words to explain how thankful I am. I will strongly suggest for the readers of my blog who feel them as an experienced Oracle DBA to attend his seminar at any cost.

ps1: also Graham Woods was in Istanbul, he did a very similar presentation he did on UKOUG last December which I already shared my notes before here.

ps2: UKOUG 2008 call for papers submission deadline for Oracle technology category is getting closer, 9 May 2008. This year I also want to come front, do at least one presentation, I have RMAN, APEX and of course Tuning related topics in my mind. So let’s come front, share our experiences with world’s largest independent Oracle User group community.

ps3: In my 20th month now I am very close to my 200,000th hit(wordpress’s counter). Recently my wordpress dashboard automatically evolved somehow and now I have lots of new stats. As far as I see people once loved event 10046 tracing, flashing back options after 10g and of course my initial best practices posts and no matter what I post after these three seems to be dominant and to stay on top visited list forever I guess. So anyway, thank you for reading and I really hope to have more comments in the future since sometimes I really feel I am alone here :)

Graham Wood and Jonathan Lewis will be in İstanbul next month!

I saw Marco Gralike’s announcement so I also wanted to make a similar one. But this time Graham Wood will visit my company and we planned to be together with Wood for a half day on 21th of April.

Also on 22nd of April Jonathan Lewis will be in İstanbul, this time for his three days seminar. You can find the details of this announcement here. Below are my favorite links for summaries of Lewis’s previous seminars;

http://tonguc.wordpress.com/2007/03/01/another-great-undocumented-oracle-hint/

http://orajourn.blogspot.com/2007/11/day-1-with-jonathan-lewis-execution.html

http://orajourn.blogspot.com/2007/11/day-2-with-jonathan-lewis-writing.html

http://orajourn.blogspot.com/2007/11/day-3-understanding-and-assisting-cbo.html

Alejandro Vargas Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture Seminar Notes

Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture(MAA) is a set of high availability best practices which targets to minimize the complexity in designing the optimal high availability for critical production databases. I do not work as an infrastructure(operational) dba for years. Within last years especially with 10g Release 2 Oracle’s availability options evolved a lot. I try to catch up with these on my laptop, thanks to vmware, and I really admire how everything is as is now with Oracle.

When I think about the recent years I may easily give my job description like this; database developer, part-time fire-fighter and part-time myth-buster. I always loved to develop database applications, I am working with application developers as an old Oracle dba for the last 4 years. Mostly database modeling, physical design, Oracle’s optimizer and testing for performance is what I think I am useful. Also if there is an Apex project I never miss the chance, developing Apex applications is always fun for me.

I used myth-buster on purpose, because lots of my time is dedicated to exorcism of some evil believes which mostly depend on rumors or some n years aged wrong and/or undocumented test results; “never use Oracle xyz feature it is buggy” or “this optimizer you call in fact is an abuser, I never get what I need without hints” kind of very common behavior. Usually it feels like being Van Helsing; read the documentation which is available to anyone and easy to understand, not rocket science at the end, and kill the beast with a small test case which is most probably adapted from Asktom or the Oracle Users’ Co-operative FAQ kind of resource. In the beginning this is a delicious rant but after years it becomes boring, disappointing and dissatisfying. What is the rationality behind not reading and trying to understand the technology that you are using to make money, please advice me? These days everybody is after some quick and dirty solutions.

I used fire-fighter on purpose, because I am called for aid when something really goes crazy or unexpected on production after a long development and testing period. These cases are the worst ones since with my experience it is usually too late and changes needed will cause delays and angry customers. Still it is a fire and I do whatever I can, in most cases interestingly even this amount is enough. But this is Oracle’s success of course, there is always some options guide you directly to the root cause of the problem and then a workaround related. Like Apex I am also a fan of 10g Grid Control, I never miss the chance to use it when there is a performance problem especially.

During Mr.Alejandro Vargas three days seminar I strongly felt that I have to leave this mystique world of mine and return back to the world where checklists, metalink notes and documents rule. If you do not follow them you even do not get to the point where you ruin everything. How unbelievable it is that anybody can develop some piece of code, google and copy&paste are the major enabler technologies here. When it comes to Oracle database, how ironic also that it works very satisfactory with its defaults and let people think they are “developer”s or “dba”s. I believe even after 10g’s self management capabilities and Grid Control heaven, today database market need experienced people more than ever. Do you think anybody can implement RAC or Data Guard options without reading and testing carefully? And I seriously bet that if all Oracle users as a prerequisite only read the concept guide all around the world, if you consider Oracle’s dominant leadership in the market, we should easily expect a technological shift, of course my share should be less otn forums type of questions, fires and myths.

When I contacted Alejandro with the content of this MAA seminar my primary focus was to motivate our senior dba staff in using these features. We have unlimited kind of Oracle licensing, so avoiding these options we already purchased is both a threat and causing inefficiency for the company. Alejandro was the right person and luckily he was very interested with the content and as a result for the last three days was successful. But this was only the beginning, there is a big challenge waiting. Any expert who is motivated to implement these new MAA features with 10g Release 2 will be facing another very common behavior; “if it works never take a risk and change it” Of course managers need to avoid risks, but if this is the only priority you kill the creativity in your organization, how may a dba can take risk for the sake of performance of a system if you do not support him as his manager? The answer is simple, no dba would do that and you live with a release xx years old forever. So I plan the next step as to implement and document a MAA solution’s success, this will be a reference point I hope. This is my new priority and motivation for the coming months, so I really suspect that I will be ending up as being an operational Oracle dba again, but if something unexpected happens my b plan is already in pending status :)

I hope you enjoy my three days seminar notes below, much more is already published at Alejandro’s blog, he also may be publishing a post related to this seminar with our questions’ answers and his İstanbul experiences I guess.

10gR2 Automatic Storage Management(ASM)

10gR2 Real Application Clusters(RAC)

10gR2 Data Guard

10gR2 Recovery Manager(RMAN)

10gR2 Flashback

10gR2 Enterprise Manager Grid Control

Two days tuning seminar with Joze Senegacnik

After Mr.Jonathan Lewis, Mr.Julian Dyke and Mr.Lutz Hartmann tomorrow and friday Mr.Joze Senegacnik will be our guest in İstanbul, world’s most beautiful city :)

I hope we will have nice time with Joze and since Joze is a very knowledgeable Oracle expert the seminar will be very useful for me. Of course again I will be sharing my notes’ highlights like I did before for this years’ seminars ( Lewis / Hartmann).

Joze requested that before the seminar we need to prepare a homework, a 10046 case. For me this was an easy homework since for the past several years I have been tracing anything around me called as a bug or a performance problem :) So I found this recent forums thread interesting to show the power of 10046 analysis and I hope the class also like it.

Optimizing for Performance by Joze Senegacnik 2 Day Seminar Notes – Istanbul, Turkcell Academy 23-23/08/2007

Note : Check out Joze’s hidden pga parameter tuning paper I recently mentioned and used during a critical migration, if you still didn’t experience it yet.

Another Oracle ACE was our guest in Istanbul

After Mr.Jonathan Lewis and Mr.Julian Dyke, Mr.Lutz Hartmann was our guest for a two days seminar. I had very nice time with Lutz, and the seminar was very useful, I will be sharing my notes’ highlights like I did before for the other seminars.

First of all I want open some questions I noted during the seminar for your comments which I will be researching;
Q1> what affect does cache option has in lru list positioning?
Q2> in plsql if we define a variable with the same name of a column and use it at where clause will it raise an error or bring all rows; “declare empid …; begin … select …. where empid = empid; ..”
Q3> does alter system buffer cache flushes nK pools also or just the default one?
Q4> how does a pkey affect a count(*)
Q5> is %10 stale option hard-coded, any hidden parameter for this
Q6> is also dictionary stats included to the auto stale statistics gathering job

And here are my notes from this very nice seminar;

Seminar Notes : Inside Oracle 10g by Lutz Hartmann

After the seminar let me say it again if you are still not using or planning to use 10gR2 you are missing so much, also you need to use RMAN and EM, these are great and they will ease your life believe me.

Lutz thank you again for this seminar, hope to meet you again :)