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.

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Some Thoughts on Blogging and Vendor Management

I was thinking about the alternative cost of blogging and ironically I found myself blogging. :) Here the cost I want to highlight is the time spent of course. Blogging starts like training, it is always harder to write on a topic, then post after post you receive comments and socially this kind of an interaction and the feeling of being followed motivates blogging more, with higher standarts. After some time you find yourself addicted to blogging I guess, whatever you do you search for a reason to blog. At this point if you stop for a second and think the time you give up to blogging instead of being with your family and friends it is really scary in my opinion.

At tonguc.oracleturk.org I have blogged from 30-01-2006 to 25-12-2006: 483 posts, 1 page, contained within 2 categories. And than here at tonguc.wordpress.com I have been blogging since 25-12-2006: 231 posts, 5 pages, 386 total comments, contained within 18 categories and 35 tags. Over 314,000 wordpress hits within two years and important friendships all around the world. So after all this time nowadays I think to limit my blogging addiction, in the future I will be blogging less most probably but I will be still around. :)

First two coming posts will be my seminar notes of Oracle Index Internals by Richard Foote and implementing a near real time telco service datawarehouse with Oracle’s advanced queue option: service layers will be notified based on a ~300 to 500 GB of data streaming from network devices including location updates of ~36 million subscribers. Can AQ handle this workload, if so how, we will see soon. :)

I was also thinking about the global economic crisis and what kind of a vendor management strategy will be best for today’s conditions. Oracle’s already provided options within the database licence provides important cost advantages in my opinion; you nearly do not need any other vendor’s stuff for any kind of your database application need. So you get closer and closer only with one vendor like Oracle, this is a strategic partnership especially if you are doing some business at the ends. So they are always there for your success, your support needs are handled with special care since your success is also their success.