Reminder and Public Appearances 2011

April 6, 2011 By 2 Comments

First, a reminder – my Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting v2.0 online seminar starts next week already. Last chance to sign up, I can accept registrations until Sunday :-)

I won’t do another AOT seminar before Oct (or Nov) this year. More details and sign-up here:

I have rescheduled my Advanced SQL Tuning and Partitioning & Parallel Execution for Performance seminars too. I will do them in September/October. Unfortunately I’m too busy right now to do them before the summer.

Public Appearances:

  • I will be speaking at the UKOUG Exadata Special Event in London on 18th April
  • I have submitted a few papers for Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco as well (end of Sep/beginning of Oct), all about Exadata. Let’s see how it goes, but I’ll be there anyway, which means that I’ll probably show up at the Oracle Closed World event too!

And that’s all the travel I will do this year…

Virtual Conferences:

I’ll soon announce the 2nd EsSN virtual conference too ;-)

Free online stuff:

Perhaps in a month or so I will do another hacking session (I’ll plan 2 hours this time, 1 hour isn’t nearly enough for going deep). The topic will probably be about low-level details of SQL plan execution internals… stay tuned!

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

MOATS: The Mother of All Tuning Scripts!

March 29, 2011 By 54 Comments

People talk about the Oracle SQL Developer 3 being out, which is cool, but I have something even cooler for you today ;-)

I finally figured out how to convert my screen-recordings to uploadable videos, so that the text wouldn’t get unreadable and blurry.

So, here’s the first video, about a tool called MOATS, which we have built together with fellow OakTable Network member and a PL/SQL wizard Adrian Billington (of oracle-developer.net).

Here’s the video, it’s under 3 minutes long. Play the video in full screen for best results (and if it’s too slow loading, change it to lower resolution from HD mode):

Check it out and if you like MOATS, you can download it from Adrian’s website site (current version 1.05) and make sure you read the README.txt file in the zip!

Also thanks to Randolf Geist for finding and fixing some bugs in our alpha code… Note that MOATS is still kind of beta right now…

P.S. I will post my ORA-4031 and shared pool hacking video real soon now, too! :-)

P.P.S. Have you already figured out how it works?! ;-)

Update: Now you can suggest new features and improvement requests here:

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

Oracle 11gR2 has been released – and with column oriented storage option

September 1, 2009 By 23 Comments

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/

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.

Filed Under: Oracle Tagged With: ,

Oracle buys Sun – hooray!

April 20, 2009 By 4 Comments

More details here:

http://www.oracle.com/sun/index.html

Not that I care too much from the business aspect, but I sure hope this means that Solaris will become a viable OS to run Oracle on x64 platform!!! Btw the OS itself is already more than good enough – but it just should be properly supported by Oracle!

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle

I’m an Oracle ACE Director now :)

March 26, 2009 By 30 Comments

Many people have asked me that how come I’m not an Oracle ACE yet. From this week I am an Oracle ACE Director.

Here’s a link to my profile.

Its pretty big honor to be recognized by Oracle Corp at such high level.

I started working with Oracle software in 1997 and got really interested in that stuff after realizing how powerful the database was and how complex some internal details could be. Lots of opportunities to learn and learn I did!

I have been an Oracle Certified Master DBA for almost seven years now ( I took the exam in 2002 ). This is the highest certificate of technical skill Oracle gives out.

I’m also an OakTable Network member since 2004. In my eyes this is the highest recognition by industry peers an Oracle specialist can get. I’m very honored to be part of the team, not only because of the kick-ass knowledge everybody there has, but every member I’ve personally met is actually a cool person!

So, I think Oracle ACE status nicely completes the previous two “credentials” I had (and worked hard for!!!), OCM is the official technical skill recognition by Oracle, OakTable membership is the industry peer recognition and now the ACE director is Oracle’s recognition for my contributions so far.

I’d like to say thanks to Porus Havewala who recommended me for the ACE director program. Check out his blog if you’re interested in Enterprise Manager & such, he’s a Grid Control expert ( http://enterprise-manager.blogspot.com )

Ok, enough of ego-tripping for this year, back to work. I have a mutex contention troubleshooting article to finish ;-)

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle

Experiments with Google Custom Search engine

June 17, 2008 By 3 Comments

This post is loosely related to Oracle, as I wanted to have a single point of entry search page for my Oracle-related searching – which I could bring up with pressing a hotkey combination.

Google has a thing called Custom Search Engine, which allows you define custom search engine rules, sites to include, exclude etc. Therefore you can demote or completely exclude some unwanted sites from your search results. Alberto Dell’Era just commented on this on Jonathan Lewis’es blog entry about Firefox.

CSE sounded promising, but the problem is that if you sign up for the free custom search service, Google will show its adverts on the result page without such filtering, which still can lead you to some crap sites out there.

Anyway, the search page I use is available here (both for download and online use), feel free to use it if the adverts don’t bother you.

http://tanelpoder.com/search/

To be fair to you, I also mention that if anyone clicks on advert links in CSE results, Google pays the search engine creator (me) money… I doubt if I ever become a billionaire because of that, but if it pays the yearly $25 I spend on WordPress domain mapping and custom CSS, I’d be happy :)
if you don’t like that fact, feel free to take the simple source code of my page and modify it for your own needs.

Ok, next post will be about a good use-case for ORADEBUG for crashing reluctant-to-die server processes, I hope this makes up for my spam post here… (hmm… can one actually spam their own blog?)

Update: Note that I haven’t explicitly excluded any sites from the search results, I have just marked the ones I like and those are given a better ranking than other sites. However its still possible you see junk sites in results when you search for some specific keywords. Anyway, my search page is intended just as an example, feel free to customize yourself a search engine matching exactly your needs.

 

Filed Under: Cool stuff