Openworld 2009 – Tuesday Summary

Everyone awoke Tuesday to a pretty heavy rainstorm…  The news reported winds strong enough to tip over motorcycles and there were a few reports of trees falling on cars.  It seemed everyone at the conference was trying to get a cab, so after awhile I decided to try and hunt down an umbrella.  I managed to find one at a store close to the hotel and headed towards the Moscone Center.  

Openworld broadcasts the keynotes to various rooms around the conference center, so I decided to go to one of those instead of the keynote hall.  It was pretty empty so I took off my shoes and hoped my feet would dry out before the keynote was over and I had to put them back on.  I missed quite a bit of it, so I would rather wait until I had a chance to watch it via Oracle On Demand before I talk about it.

Sessions I attended during the day:

Making Oracle E-Business Suite Highly Available: What’s the Path? 

This presentation was ok but I would recommend Elke Phelpes session: Implementing an Advanced Architecture for Oracle E-Business Suite for a better overview of HA features for E-Business Suite.  
Some good points were made tho about defining high availability and the importance of an SLA (Service Level Agreement).

Hidden Gems of Oracle Data Pump   

I was hoping for more from this session.. When a title says ‘hidden gems’ i’m expecting to hear something about a feature that isn’t well known or used but the developers think has alot of potential.  I remember a session from many years ago about flashback technology.  At the time people were only using it for certain data related recovery scenarios.  I sat in on a presentation where they described using it for refreshing development environments.    I really like it when I find a presentation that uses a feature in unexpected ways.

Back to this one… It did give a good overview of the new features including Compression and Encryption.  Unfortunately you have to purchase the ASO and compression features in order to take advantage of it.    One item of note is that these features do not work over a network link.   The level of compression is comparable to the unix compress utility but not as good as gzip.

There are multiple ways to encrypt the data.  By specifying a password, transparently by using a wallet to provide the encryption key and a combination of both.

They spent alot of time talking about the Metadata Differ, which is a new feature of the Oracle Data Pump metadata API used to compare 2 objects, show their differences and generate ALTERS (if possible) to modify one object to be identical to the other.  Unfortunately this requires the OEM Change Management Pack license.  If your interested in how this feature works beneath the scenes then take a look at this presentation.

Measure, Interpret, and Analyze Oracle I/O Performance Data    

This session started with a video clip about the company the presenter worked for.  I don’t mind a shameless plug but it was a bit of overkill especially since 90% of the video had nothing to do with the company but technology highlights from the past 30 years.

The line up for this session was insane but luckily it was for people on standby.   There were a number of real life I/O performance examples, useful queries and some excel functions to help interpret the data.
In the ASM presentation I went to yesterday, which was given by the ASM team members from Oracle they mentioned that double stripping (which means that you have been provided LUNS which have been striped over multiple disks and then you use ASM to stripe data across the LUNs) increases performance.  This presenter refers to this as  Plaid Stripe and shows a configuration which could reduce IO performance and another where it is done correctly.  He also mentions that RAID 5 isn’t as bad as it used to be and that it can be used for everything but OLTP systems.  I’m not entirely sure I agree with this statement.  I have systems which have RAID 5 and anytime there is intensive IO performance suffers greatly.  Personally, if I had enough disk to use RAID 10, I would do it.

The top 11 New Features of Oracle Database 11g Release 2     

Even though Tom Kytes presentations are mainly focused towards developers I always try to make it to one.  He’s a great presenter and always has alot of great information.  You can download the presentation from askTom website. 

He discussed many (well, 11 or was that 10 ;) features of 11g but I have to say I enjoyed the execute on a directory, file waiters, flash cache and edition based redefinition the best.  For a much better description than I can do, download the presentation.

Blogger Meetup

After the day was finished I dropped by the blogger meetup.  I was hesitant because I didn’t really know anyone there but I surprised myself by staying almost towards the end.  I introduced myself to a couple of other bloggers and had some interesting discussions on technology, blogging and the conference.

I have to say, that after meeting some of these guys and talking to them I am going to try to blog harder about E-Business Suite. If I look at the content I have posted some of it, I think, is pretty good and seems to help a few people. (Based on the feedback i’ve received.)   Other pieces of content really aren’t that great and its solutions you can easily find on Metalink.

There are a few bloggers, we all know who they are, who post some really great content and I hope someday I can look at my blog and feel the same way.