Laurent Schneider

I will be at the exhibition booth from LC Systems on the Oracle Technology Days, Thursday 16th March, 2006.

Day 3 concludes the Tom workshop in Switzerland. We started with read consistency and write consistency, with an interesting example were a single row update could make a big job run thrice slower, because of the write consistency.

Once again, Tom insist on saying that you must understand Oracle to write applications.

Tom demonstrates a few 10g features. Even if I already attended his 10gR2 new features in OpenWorld, I learnt a few interesting stuff about 10gR1, and the demo on his notebook were impressing.

Ok, let’s reveal some of those

You have surely heard of flashback database, but did you ever heard of flashforward ??? Well, if you flashback, open readonly, than you can flashback to the future afterwards !

Did you know about Case Insensitive? Did you try it? By writing the correct index, setting the correct parameters (NLS_COMP=ANSI, NLS_SORT=binary_ci), you will be using a regular index where doing where ENAME=’Scott’, the execution will actually reveal an index RANGE scan.

A life-saving package I have never heard of is DBMS_ADVANCED_REWRITE. This is simply a great way of rewriting a call you cannot rewrite in the application. Each call to the server could be rewritting by the dba. A great tuning capability. Maybe I will never use that, sounds a bit too much frightening to me, but I am so glad to know about it !

Finally, the TDE (transparent data encryption) demo was educative. On the one hand, if you do not have the wallet password, even if you are the DBA, than you cannot select an encrypted column!

Does it mean that you can hide data from the dba? Tom says NO WAY. The dba can always look your bind variable, look your package functions, and catch all your datas. What he think (and I do think that too), is that you can have a non-powerfull dba, which can reset your password, create a new user, drop a datafile, but which does not need to have the DBA role. Kind of pseudo-dba.

I believe that some systems contain data that no one is able to access. Not even the database administrator. In bank, it is not the case, the DBA is trusted, he signed some contracts to not reveal datas, etc… But in justice for example, I could imagine that the dba does not have the power to select any table (so will not be granted the dba role). I have been postings on forums quite a lot of time about it. For example thread 499144.995 in metalink in 2003. But I have no real experience about “secret” data which are hidded from the dba. Just thoughts.

One more great feature I learnt and will try on monday is datapump compression. We have always been compression regular export dumps with named pipe and “compress” in unix, there is finally a way to compress datapump exports.

Tom said: “I learn something about Oracle every single day”. Well, in Tom workshop, I learnt 42 new things in 3 days.

Today I asked : “Is it the responsability of the developper to create the table structure?”

The answer was something like that :
“You have four kind of persons.
- You have the Oracle6 DBA, who says always NO
- You have the Developer, who does not care about database
- You have the DBA/Developer, who understand the logical structures like IOT/Hash Cluster
- You have the Developer/DBA, who understand the database
In a perfect world, the Developer/DBA choose the table at design time and the DBA/Developer inform the developer about the database capabilities.
If you have a developer and a dba/developer, the dba/developer can reorganize the table as a tuning action.”

After, Tom talked about sql technics, show a few examples about “CONNECT BY” without prior generating rows, a pipelined table. Very interesting examples, with a few keyword like FIRST_VALUE and IGNORE NULLS that I have never used before.

Later in the afternoon, he starts talking about binding. Difficult topic, I was almost going to sys.dbms_lock.sleep at the end of the day.

We are a bit late on the program, probably too many questions, palindnilap and myself feel a bit bored about one person always asking a lot of question mostly off topic about experiences he had but nobody cares of…

Well, I am impatient about day three, it is going to be intense, read-write consistency among others themas.

tbc

Day one was quite interesting! We learnt a lot of staff about tuning approach, I have got confirmation that most of the “WE KNOW THAT, IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN SO” were maybe one day true, but are no longer, for example “separate index and tables”, or, delightfull, “you must periodically reorganise your tables”. I also learnt about DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO, which I may use in my dba-scripts too.

I also feel relaxed that designing a table to be IOT or Hash-Clustered is NOT a dba task, but a developer task. Wow, finally, the dba have to look at the database not at the table structure to gain performance…

In the evening, we had a dinner with my friend Fabrice, my ZKB-collegue Roman, my future ex-lc collegue Marc, a reader of tom blog and mine one called Leo, and also Lutz, who is working for Oracle University, and of course Tom, who enjoyed the fishes

soon day 2, so i have to go to bed right now

Next wednesday, Dec 7th, starts the Tom Kyte workshop in Zurich.

In the evening we will have a dinner in Zurich.

Drop me a comment if you intend to come !

I will attend Tom Kyte 3-days session in Zurich in 2 weeks. I am immensely impatient to follow his workshop !

I hope palindnilap will be there too I invited him to come to my home to go to Tom Workshop, and to have a game of xiangqi on the brand new wooden board I received yesterday.

Tom Kyte is coming to Zurich next month!
http://www.digicomp.ch/tomkyte

Very intense last day. In the morning I waked up late, and just went to OTN lounge. Well, I meet Puschitz, which speaks german too because he is austrian, and also Wim. I then ran to Moscone South for my XQuery session. Very interresting indeed…

In the afternoon, pure DBA staff :
1) shared memory
very interresting, difficult staff
2) dss
a lot of nice improvement, but highly soporific presentation
3) storage
great great great presentation from Amit Ganesh, Storage Director at oracle

Than I had a talk with Joel and Arup and a glass of wine in the garden. Than I came in the hotel, I have been kindly invited for a glass of red wine by Barbara and Lisa, two lawyers residing also in the argent hotels, thanks if you read me!

Well, I had to pack, reserve my shuttle, organise wake-up service for 05:00am

What a show! I have been waiting about 1 hour to come in to show larry. I think it was a good one. But I am not a big fan of keynotes. He answered questions after his talk, a few of them were interressant :
- how do you license multicore cpu?
Larry just answered the way Oracle does licensing is not the correct way, he would prefer a license proportional to the size and the revenue of the company (will a very poor company get everything almost free or does oracle want to earn more from the big companies?). Well, the “processor” license question has not been answered
- how do you see your chance in the cup of america?
well, larry, say what you like, you have NO CHANCE against Switzerland !
- Why is oracle support is taking so long time to understand my iTar?
Larry proposed the woman to write him a note. The question was definitely tricky, and he did not too bad, but the problem remains…

Without pause, I went to Bryn session about PL/SQL. Impressed but too tired to understand everything.

I have been playing a few games in OTN. Than I went to Oreilly and Steven Party to drink a few beers and meet very interresting people. I talked and got great hints from Mark Gurry. I have played -and lost- five games of pool with the people there.

Later I went to the big party. I walked until market with Bryn, asked him to explain me some details about his session, than took a taxi to peer 32. The fireworks were beautiful, it was very crowdy, and I had a nice talk with a fireworks engineer I took a bus which dropped me somewhere between the 7th and Market at midnight, I meet bruce lee with a flashing sun microsystems badge in the hotel lift, which did not appreciate me much, but I managed to come safe home.

What a queue for Tom Kyte session! 1000 persons have attended, and apparently a lot more had to wait outside. Very interresting. I am especially seduced by the Online Transportable Tablespace, it was SO BAD to make the tablespaces readonly before transport. I got my signed copy of his book
In the afternoon, I was too much dead to assist some session, so I visited the exhibitors and will come home with plenty of gifts for Dora and Loïc - what a pain to type the ï on an american keyboard, but alt-139 does the trick.
Than OTN/lounge, with a dozen of fans we had the opportunity to ask questions to tom.
On the evening, we had the blogger dinner. I particullary appreciated! Even if I have a terrible french accent, I have been able to chat with my neighbours. The food was good, apart from the sorbet, but the way I pronounced “sorbet” was apparently very amusing!

I had a nice monday. In the morning, after Oracle President and Intel Presentation I attend Steven Feuerstein session. Very Interresting indeed. I just realised I know nothing about PLSQL. Later in the afternoon, I had a few chessgames and reversi with Steven. Thanks god, I am better at chess than at plsql

I also meet Justin from OTN. I meet Mark from OTN, we had a deep talk about the feedback forum, I told him that my correction on OTN document feedback have been forwarded but never corrected and he is going to do something about that… good!

On otn night I meet APC and John. We had a few beers, or redwine …

I participated to the DBA hot seat competition and I have totally humiliated to fail at the second question… I really needed a few more “pizzas” for consolation and I have a very strong headache this morning

Ok, let’s go to God, I have Tom Kyte session this morning )))

well, I just missed the appreciation dinner. I did not survive the flight + timeoffset + xtreme weekend. I sleeped from 4pm to 11pm…
Finally got a cheeseburger and three beers instead of a nice dinner and good wine

I remembered the time in 9iR2 when load/balancing was just dicing between the instance. In 10gR2, I noticed that load balancing is much better. I did a test, start 28 sessions from an external client, 12 went to node 1, 12 to node 2. Very impressive.

In 10gR2 RAC, the listener gets statistics collected by MMON, and balances load much more efficiently…

The Failover is also working correctly. I just powered off Doug PC (we work in team in this lab), and after second try it worked. The TNSNAMES must be configured correctly, with FAILOVER and virtual ip.

I also tried to install RAC/Linux/vmware on my notebook, but I stupidely remove the linux grub boot partition and I cannot boot anymore… I need a doctor soon

This first RAC day was intense! My neighbour and I just installed clusterware, configure iscsi to use LUN in SUSE and started ASM and a clustered Database!

all doc are on
http://www.x-treme-lab.com

I did my timetable in sqlplus. Quite surprised I have to travel over 15 hours to go there!!! what a trip! I have never made such a long flight in one day!

set head off feedb off
col z for a14
col y for a17
col x for a17 fold_a
alter session set nls_timestamp_tz_format=’DD. HH24:MI TZH:TZM’;

select
    '’ z,
 ’zurich-sf’ y, ’sf-zurich’ x,
    ’flight’ z,
 substr(b-a+d-c,12,5) y,substr(f-e+h-g,12,5) x,
    ’travel’ z,
 substr(d-a,12,5) y,substr(h-f,12,5) x,
    '’ z, '’ y, '’ x,
    '’ z, ’localtime’ y, ’zurichtime’ x,
    ’zurich dep. ’ z,
 a y, a at time zone ’Europe/Zurich’ x,
    ’atlanta arr.’ z,
 b y, b at time zone ’Europe/Zurich’ x,
    ’atlanta dep.’ z,
 c y, c at time zone ’Europe/Zurich’ x,
    ’SF arr.     ’ z,
 d y, d at time zone ’Europe/Zurich’ x,
    ’SF dep.     ’ z,
 e y, e at time zone ’Europe/Zurich’ x,
    ’atlanta arr.’ z,
 f y, f at time zone ’Europe/Zurich’ x,
    ’atlanta dep.’ z,
 g y, g at time zone ’Europe/Zurich’ x,
    ’zurich arr. ’ z,
 h y, h at time zone ’Europe/Zurich’ x
from
( select
    timestamp ’2005-02-16 10:30:00 Europe/Zurich’ a,
    timestamp ’2005-02-16 14:55:00 US/East-Indiana’ b,
    timestamp ’2005-02-16 16:40:00 US/East-Indiana’ c,
    timestamp ’2005-02-16 18:29:00 US/Pacific-New’ d,
    timestamp ’2005-02-23 08:21:00 US/Pacific-New’ e,
    timestamp ’2005-02-23 15:44:00 US/East-Indiana’ f,
    timestamp ’2005-02-23 17:25:00 US/East-Indiana’ g,
    timestamp ’2005-02-24 08:30:00 Europe/Zurich’ h
  from dual)
/

               zurich-sf         sf-zurich
flight         15:14             13:28
travel         16:59             15:09

               localtime         zurichtime
zurich dep.    16. 10:30 +01:00  16. 10:30 +01:00
atlanta arr.   16. 14:55 -05:00  16. 20:55 +01:00
atlanta dep.   16. 16:40 -05:00  16. 22:40 +01:00
SF arr.        16. 18:29 -08:00  17. 03:29 +01:00
SF dep.        23. 08:21 -08:00  23. 17:21 +01:00
atlanta arr.   23. 15:44 -05:00  23. 21:44 +01:00
atlanta dep.   23. 17:25 -05:00  23. 23:25 +01:00
zurich arr.    24. 08:30 +01:00  24. 08:30 +01:00

on my return trip on leave sf at 8:21am and arrive at 8:30am in zurich !

What time is it? I just hope it is soon friday
Friday, I am flying to San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld
I received this mail for the appreciation dinner : Please let me know if you are available to attend by Monday, September 12. well, I said “fine, see you on monday”. But of course it is on sunday, today is just the deadline, not the dinner.
Also on Mark Rittman Blog, I wrote the otn night is on tuesday, as written on oracle.com, Tuesday, December 7, 6:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Marriott Hotel, Yerba Buena Level. Of course, it was on December 7 last year, and the link is somewhat misleading… thanks for the reminder Mark, and I will attend to your dinner on tuesday.
Well, I almost had my appreciation dinner on monday, my otn night on tuesday and my blogger dinner on any other day… I definitely need to write down my appointements before going there !

Well, next month I am going to SF for OOW 2K5. I am invited by Oracle to participate to the Meet the expert session (otn underground). I cannot stand waiting to meet my oracle forums pals alive! I am also taking part to the xtreme sessions and I expect them to be xtreme!

It almost 20 years I have not been in the states. I am very excited !

I already installed DB 10gR2 on my notebook. It has been very easy. I first installed as a virtual machine (vmware) RedHat Entreprise Linux 3 update 3. Then Oracle. My collegues did a little bit complain about the 5 giga download, because the whole network was slow. Only 1 cd is necessary for DB installation. Rest is companion, client, clusterware, grid, etc…

I hope I can get a working 10gR2 grid in SF ! Even a beta release would be great