UKOUG 2010 – Day 2

Tuesday and as I start to do this write-up at lunchtime I have the feeling that today will not be as good as yesterday, at least not in my eyes.

The day started with a talk on system statistics but it did not do anything for me and I found it much too dry and dull. Chest la vie.

Next up was Tom Kyte on how to use AWR and ASH data. He is of course a very accomplished speaker and he looks so comfortable when speaking. Perhaps some time was lost at the beginning whilst covering bstat/estat and but the talk was very good and some excellent examples of scripts that can be used to refine and show your own data.  A very good talk. This was the third time in two days I have heard about the dbms_workload_repository.add_colored_sql procedure which allows you to track AWR info for a statement that would not normally get into the topN statements for a snapshot. It looks to be very useful and something I want to experiment with when I get back to base. Although an initial thought would be that you had to know the sql existed otherwise you would not know to track it.

Daniel Fink again after that with a thought-provoking lecture on how to diagnose problems and get to a root cause analysis. It was not what I expected but I enjoyed the time and I thought it might make a worthwhile team meeting session to see how we approach some common issues and whether we can lay down some sort of rules or methodology.

Before lunch it was a case study of using compression and partitioning in 11GR2 to save a lot of disk space. Presented well by Dev Nayak it was one of those where the slides told everything and downloading them would be as good as attending the event.

There does seem to be a number of cancellations to sessions today, I assume due to the weather but one I was going to in the afternoon had gone (DG fast start failover) so it was Jonathan Lewis instead. Not a bad replacement at all. The talk was very good and I learned what ‘concatenation’ means when seen in an explain plan. Simplistically it is a sign of coding that includes and ‘if then else’ construct and the plan will show the cost of either path it could take.

That was my last session of the day as I wanted to read up on a couple of things and also review my Wednesday presentation – 12:15 Hall 6.

Overall a day that I was happy with but not as good for me personally as yesterday. However someone else said that Tuesday was much better for them than Monday so it is very much horses for courses.

PS I have heard from other people that the new features on SQL Developer 3.0 are very good and I intend downloading it soon.