Wow, the conference is flying past fast. Its already the morning of day 3. The appreciation event is tonight, hopefully it won't rain! Tomorrow is the last day, yikes!
I didn't sleep well Sunday night (remember my neighbours?), so I decided to sleep in Tuesday morning if I could. So unfortunately I missed the keynote in the morning. I will definitely catch the replay later.
My first session Extreme Database Administration: New Features for Expert DBAs talked about some of the new features coming up on Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. It covered some of the same material as a session I attended Monday but if you don't diversify your schedule your bound to get some overlap.
The session talked about Real-Time ADM which allows for real-time analysis of hung or slow database systems. It connects to the environment via a lightweight connection that doesn't acquire any additional latches or locks and by passes the SQL layer. It detects resource constraints/limits, hangs, memory issues, deadlocks, etc...
Comparative performance analysis is another feature which will allow you to run a full ADDM analysis over two AWR snapshots. Used to help answer the question, performance was good yesterday but terrible today.
Ash Analytics is an advanced ASH report which looks similar to the top activity screen but you are not limited to selecting certain time frames but can expand the analysis by dragging the graph to any point in time.
Next up the presenter talked about change management features including difficulties in obtaining accurate test data. Application Data Model (ADM) is a new feature to help address those issues. It scans application schemas to model the relationships between tables and columns. Enables data masking and subsetting operations to be application aware. Data subsetting can be done by percentages of tables or by columns (regions, year, etc) at runtime. One example showed subsetting 100GB of data to 20GB took 12 minutes using the export method. Secure Database Testing is another new feature which integrates real time application testing with data masking.
Database Upgrade Automation looks like an interesting feature as well. Grid Control will detect that a new version is available and suggest the best upgrade path. It will analyze the database for potential upgrade issues such as space, version, invalid objects, etc. You can mass deploy binaries to all targets and create out of place copies, then switch the instances to new installations. You can switch back easily if issues are encountered.
Exadata Management allows for comprehensive tools to manage all of your Exa servers. I didn't take many notes here since I won't be fortunate enough to use this hardware anytime soon. Lastly Database as a Cloud Service was discussed. This seems like a really good feature for large DBA shops who provision and support alot of database environments. Easy provisioning and deployment of prepackaged, preconfigured databases with metering and charge back capabilities.
I missed the next session due to a call from my manager, so explored the exhibition halls. Maybe i'm getting older but this is the first year I have not sat in on any presentations. I find you sit there for 5-15 minutes to listen about a product i'll never use to get a trinket that my kids will never play with. ;) I end up walking around with a bunch of extra stuff weighing me down all day and then risk having my luggage overweight on the return flight. Its happened many times before! Don't worry tho, my kids will still get a gift, one they will hopefully actually use tho. ;)
Afterwards I attended Steven Chan's Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and Roadmap presentation. This one is a must for me each year. As the abstract says, "Is your Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack up-to-date? Are you taking advantage of all the latest options and capabilities? This Oracle Development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack...." This is a centralized place to make sure you on supported versions, the desupport timelines, certifications with other products and features. If you didn't attend be sure to keep an eye on Steven Chan's blog as i'm pretty sure he will post it there at some point.
I did a last minute switch up and went to Oracle Recovery Manager (Oracle RMAN) and Oracle Data Guard: Seven Cool Tips from Oracle . If we take advantage of any features coming up it may be data guard. So I thought this would be a good presentation to take in. The "Tips" were ok, 3 on RMAN, 3 on Dataguard and one from the Customer Testimonial. They talked about using Guaranteed Restore Points with no IO impact and the tip was that you didn't need to explicitly enable flashback database.
"Super" quick restore by pointing the system to an image copy of a datafile in the FRA in the event of a failure. I'm not sure how practical that one is.. I don't know anyone that uses image backups. Most people take advantage of RMAN because of the way it skips un-used blocks, compression, etc.
One of the data guard tips for 11.2 is flushing redo. Automatically shipping redo logs over to the standby. Previously this had to be done manually because there was a potential for dataloss even in maximum availability unless it was done manually.
The customer testimonial was pretty good. Enterprise is a 16 billion dollar car rental company and I was surprised to learn that they don't use RAC. Lisa Reinheimer described their environment and how they are using dataguard. I always like listening to how other companies architect their environments. It gives me ideas and lets me know if i'm on the right track (if i'm already using the features). If your interested in seeing their setup you should download the presentation.
Finally I attended Best Practices for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance Tuning . I can't even begin to tell you how much material was covered in this presentation. This presentation was conducted by members of the EBS performance team. You really need to download this presentation if you support an EBS environment. There was too much content to even dream of capturing it all to post a summary. Its basically a centralized presentation listing out tons of tuning tips, metalink notes discussing best practices and performance patches. Enhancements to new FND_TRACE in 12.1.2 , Note: 1362660.1 for example. Recommended performance patches for EBS can be found in note 2440401. Great presentation. I'll be referring back to this one quite a bit.
That was my day. Afterwards I went to supper with some old colleagues to an Italian Restaurant in North Beach. A nice walk down to the pier to burn off supper and a trolly ride back to the hotel.
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