Openworld 2009 – Monday Summary

Monday started with a keynote by Safra Catz and Charles Phillips.  The main point they drove home was that they have been focusing very hard on integrating the various products they have acquired and engineering them to work together.  The many acquisitions have been so that Oracle has all the parts to offer their customers a complete solution.   They are slavishly devoted to open standards, so that if you wanted, you could buy software from multiple vendors. But they hope that over time many of those pieces will be from Oracle.   Addressing the worries of what will happen to Sun, Mysql,etc, they will do what they have always done, make the products better.

I changed around my schedule for Monday at the last minute.   I had registered for the RAC hands on lab but I was afraid it would be similar to the Weblogic lab I attended yesterday.   A friend of mine was at the Active Data Guard lab and he mentioned that it was following steps in a workbook.   I can do these things at home so I thought my time would be better spent attending sessions.

I skipped my first session because it was at the Hilton and my second was back at Moscone.  With only 15 minutes between them it would have been tight to make it back and I really wanted to attend the second one.   The exhibition center opened at 10:30 so I spent 45 minutes or so in there exploring.

Real-Life Tuning and Monitoring of Your Oracle Weblogic Server and Oracle Database

This presentation by Doron Lev-Ari was pretty good.  It started with an review of how Oracle handles sql statements and transitioned to how Weblogic manages them.   He offered some tips on using prepared statements, caching within the weblogic server, performance and troubleshooting tips.

Based on the description of this session I was hoping for more tuning from a system administration standpoint but it was mainly focused at developers.

Introducing Oracle Identity Management 11g: Key New Features and Product Directions

I’ve only been using OID for the past 6 months, so i’m not very familiar with it yet.  We primarily use it for authentication so this session provided a good overview of the product in general.  It showed me that I have alot left to learn about this particular product.

Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Road Map and Vision: Release 12.1 and Beyond

There was alot of information in this presentation and if you are an EBS dba I would highly recommend reviewing the presentation.   The presenters covered the various management packs which provide you with centralized management, pro-active monitoring and automated cloning.  You can also scramble sensitive data during cloning with the Application Management Pack, which you cannot do manually.

End to end tracing so that you can trace a session from the midTier down to the database tier and back.  I haven’t looked into this yet but I can attest to the difficulty in doing this without tools, although over time I figured out how to do it.

Oracle Database 11g: Performance Innovations 

We have just started a project in which we will be using the 11g database, so I thought this session would provide a good overview of some of the performance enhancements and I wasn’t wrong.  Features discussed included SQL Results Cache, In-memory Parallel Execution, Database Smart Flash, OCI Consistent Client Cache, Times Ten In Memory Database Cache Grid, Active Dataguard Query Offload and storing all types of files within the database.

Slash Storage Costs with Oracle Automatic Storage Management 

I’ll admit that up until now I have been very hesitant to use ASM outside of a RAC environment.  The reason is that up until recently I have worked for big companies with dedicated storage teams and large SANS.  It made sense to rely on their expertise to manage storage and work with them to tune it for database performance.

Early this year I joined a small company, one which I wear multiple hats, including system administration.  Now I am responsible for everything from bare metal to the applications that reside on them.  After seeing this presentation I think its time for another look at this product.

The key features of ASM were discussed such as automatic I/O load balancing, automatic mirroring and automatic re-balancing when storage changes.  New features such as the Dynamic Volume manager which allows you to create ACFS and 3rd party file systems such as ext3 on top of volumes.   ACFS snapshots which are used to aid in recoverability.

Another nice feature is Intelligent Data Placement which puts frequently accessed data on the outside of a disk platter.  One thing to note is that ASM doesn’t know if it sees a physical disk or LUN and bases the fast/slow parts of the disk on sector numbers.  You can still see a performance benefit tho by grouping hot data together.

In the future they are planning on implementing ACFS Replication for disaster recovery, similar to SRDF.

After a busy day of sessions I skipped the OTN party and went to supper with some colleagues.  Our first stop was the Crab House on Pier 39, followed by a Ghirardelli Hot Fudge Brownie Sunday an a trolly ride back to our hotels.  

After a 17hr day I was pretty drained and feel asleep pretty quickly.