NoCOUG's November 15, 2001 Meeting

Our November 15, 2001 meeting was held at the Embassy Suites hotel in South San Francisco. Some of the presentations from the meeting are available for download. Meeting Description The November 15, 2001 meeting had parallel sessions on the topics of database administration, application development, and data warehousing. The agenda and session descriptions were as follows: Note: All sessions start promptly at the time scheduled. Please take your seat early so as not to disturb other attendees. 08:00-09:00  - Registration opens 09:00-09:45  - Opening Remarks and Announcements 09:45-10:30 - Keynote: "Oracle@Genentech"     Jim Leonard, Director, Genentech 10:45-11:00  - Morning Break 11:00-12:00  - Parallel Session #1: DBA Development Data Warehousing "Protecting an Oracle Database" Aaron Newman, Founder and CTO, Application Security, Inc. "Top 10 SQL Tuning Tips" Guy Harrison, Director of Monitoring and Oracle Tools Development, Quest Software "Oracle9i for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Overview" George Lumpkin, Director, Product Management, SQL/DSS, Oracle Corporation 12:00-01:15  - Lunch Break 01:15-02:15  - Parallel Session #2: DBA Development Data Warehousing "Optimizing Your Oracle Database Through Storage Virtualization" Matt Miller, Product Marketing Manager, Veritas "Top 10 SQL Tuning Tips" continued "New Analytical SQL Functionality in Oracle8i" Willie Albino, Senior Database Analyst, eBay 02:15-03:00  - Afternoon Break 03:00-04:00  - Parallel Session #3: DBA Development Oracle by Oracle "Oracle 9i New Features: Making the DBA's Life Easier" Daniela Hansell, Senior Product Manager, System Management Products, Oracle Corporation "Java for PL/SQL Developers" Joe Greenwald, President and CTO, ODK Incorporated "How We Avoided the Data Warehouse 'Death March'" Chris Lawson, Oracle DBA consultant 04:15-??? - NoCOUG Reception / No Host Bar onsite at Embassy Suites Oracle@Genentech: Jim will tell us about Genentech and some of the things the company is doing with Oracle. He will finish up with a short video of the Genentech tour. Protecting an Oracle Database: Oracle databases are a core component of enterprise systems, and house some of an organization's most valuable assets. Yet the security of Oracle is often overlooked. There is little knowledge about database security leading to a large amount of security risk. Oracle databases are also becoming more and more accessible through the Internet. This leads to a situation where security becomes a requirement rather than a luxury. While Oracle's security features are rich, they are also complex and hard to implement. In this presentation, Aaron will address several of the most overlooked and unclear topics on Oracle security. He will also discuss how hackers are attacking databases and how to prevent this from happening to your database. Intermediate Optimizing Your Oracle Database Through Storage Virtualization: In the age of eBusiness and massive growth of data, databases have become mission critical applications. Storage virtualization, managing data from a logical rather than physical model, is essential to enable IT departments with tight budgets to meet the demands of growing data and tougher SLAs. Consistent management across multiple OS and storage platforms eliminates the need to learn multiple OS or array-based tools and can more efficiently use disk capacity. Performance and availability are also key considerations for Oracle environments in order to ensure application response times with databases growing exponentially. The ability to administer and manage Oracle online, through a file system, with the speed of raw partitions is no longer a nice to have - it is a necessity. Planned downtime is no longer tolerable and tuning of data access must be real time. Unplanned downtime must also be minimized or eliminated through quick recovery and policy-based capacity planning. This presentation will discuss these trends and how storage virtualization can enable IT to meet the demands of today's economy. Intermediate Oracle 9i New Features: Making the DBA's Life Easier: Oracle Enterprise Manager is Oracle's standard management framework that consists of a centralized console and a set of powerful tools to provide comprehensive administration, monitoring, diagnostics and tuning capabilities. This presentation will highlight the key new features of Oracle Enterprise Manager 9i and some plans for upcoming releases. Top 10 SQL Tuning Tips: SQL tuning is usually the most effective way to improve application performance and avoid unnecessary hardware upgrades. In this presentation Guy Harrison - author of "Oracle SQL High Performance Tuning" (Prentice Hall, 2000) and a senior product architect at Quest Software - will provide an overview of the fundamental principles of optimizing SQL performance. Beginner to Intermediate Java for PL/SQL Developers: This presentation is for experienced PL/SQL-Forms developers. Joe shows the similarities and differences between PL/SQL and Java, and stresses how easy it is for PL/SQL developers to learn Java. Joe also shows how to integrate PL/SQL and Java: using Java in the database server, calling Java from PL/SQL, calling PL/SQL from Java using JDBC, and calling Java classes from Forms. Advanced Oracle9i for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Overview: This presentation will describe the Oracle9i technologies designed to support data warehouses and business intelligence applications. This presentation will discuss key RDBMS enhancements in the area of scalability, performance, and managability. Additionally, this presentation will describe how Oracle9i provides a true 'business intelligence platform' through the integration of ETL (Extraction, Transformation, Loading), OLAP, and data mining technologies. New Analytical SQL Functionality in Oracle8i: In this presentation Willie will provide attendees with an introduction to Oracle8i's enhanced analytical processing capabilities. These capabilities include the CUBE and ROLLUP extensions to the GROUP BY clause of the SELECT statement, a family of analytic SQL functions which enable rankings, moving window calculations, and lead/lag analysis, a family of regression functions, and the CASE expression which provides if-then logic useful in many situations. Beginner How We Avoided the Data Warehouse "Death March": Data warehouse projects are notable for their poor track record. Often, frustrated developers "jump ship" as the project falls behind, customer dissatisfaction increases, and disaster looms. In this case study, Chris Lawson reviews a successful strategy used for implementing an Oracle 8i "Data Warehouse on the Web" for an e-learning corporation in San Francisco. Besides discussing overall strategy, Chris will also discuss various performance tuning tactics - some that work well in the database, and others that work well in marketing literature. The emphasis in this presentation will be on proven steps that will help the DBA and designer build a successful data warehouse. Intermediate If you have suggestions for future meetings or would like to offer feedback on previous meetings, then please complete our online survey or send us an email. Directions to Embassy Suites in South San Francisco Address: Embassy Suites is located at 250 Gateway Boulevard in South San Francisco. The telephone number is 650-589-3400. From Highway 101 North: Take Highway 101 North and exit at Grand Avenue. Take the first right turn (East Grand). Turn right at the light (also East Grand) and quickly cross to the left lane. Turn left at the first light (Gateway Blvd.). Turn right into Embassy Suites. From Highway 101 South: Take Highway 101 South and exit at Grand Avenue. Turn left at the light (toward Grand). Turn left at the light (onto Grand). Turn left at the third light (Gateway Blvd.). Turn right into Embassy Suites.