I have been very busy over last months (as you see from the lack of blog entries). Part of the reason is that I’ve been building new seminar material and now I’m pleased to announce some first seminar dates!

I have updated new seminar dates and cities in m new webpage:

• http://tech.e2sn.com/oracle-training-seminars

From April 2010 I offer total 3 different seminars

• Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting v2.0 (3 days)
• Advanced Oracle SQL Tuning (3 days)
• Partitioning and Parallel Execution for Performance (1 day)

I have rearranged the Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting class based on customer feedback, removed some content, added new content and I think this deserves a new version number, 2.0.

Also, I created an entirely new class Advanced Oracle SQL Tuning which should provide the same for SQL tuners that my Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting class has provided for database troubleshooters. This class will not start with CBO concepts and how SQL execution might work in theory, insead we will start from going very deep into understanding how Oracle really executes SQL execution plans and what is the data flow order and hierarchy in the execution plan tree.

From there we go on into learning how to read execution plans of any complexity and how to control SQL execution plans – how to make them do exactly what we want. And CBO topics will come in the end – by then the CBO fundamental concepts such as Cardinality, Density and IO/CPU Cost will make good sense and are not just some arbitrary names for some magic numbers coming from the optimizer ;-)

In addition, I separated Parallel Execution and Partitioning topics (which not everyone is using) into a separate 1-day seminar, Oracle Partitioning and Parallel Execution for Performance, which I usually deliver right after the 3-day SQL tuning seminar.

In coming days I also plan to upload some SQL tuning related content to tech.e2sn.com to show the quality of the upcoming seminar ;-)

So, feel free to check out the seminar dates and descriptions here:

• http://tech.e2sn.com/oracle-training-seminars

Tanel Poder Cool stuff, Oracle, Oracle 11g, Oracle 11gR2, Performance, SQL, Troubleshooting

You may already have noticed that Oracle 11gR2 for Linux is available for download on Oracle.com website, with documentation.

And this document ends speculation about whether Oracle 11.2 will support column-oriented storage – yes it will:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/oracle11g/pdf/oracle-database-11g-release2-overview.pdf

However, this is apparently available on Exadata storage only as a new error message below indicates:

ORA-64307: hybrid columnar compression is only supported in tablespaces residing on Exadata storage
Cause: An attempt was made to use hybrid columnar compression on unsupported storage.
Action: Create this table in a tablespace residing on Exadata storage or use a different compression type.

Update: Kevin Closson mentioned that 11gR2 doesn’t really have column oriented storage as some other products like Vertica’s and Sybase IQ use, but its rather just column oriented compression option where storage is still organized by row but individual fields in these rows use compression dictionaries whichcan span multiple block boundaries (we’ll thats my interpretation at least).

The 11gR2 release overview doc seems to be wrong in this case, as it says:

Hybrid columnar compression is a new method for organizing how data is stored. Instead of
storing the data in traditional rows, the data is grouped, ordered and stored one column at a time.

Read Kevin’s note here:

http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/oracle-switches-to-columnar-store-technology-with-oracle-database-11g-release-2/

Tanel Poder Oracle, Oracle 11g, Oracle 11gR2