Winter Conference 2008

Hosted by Oracle

February 19, 2008

at Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA

 



See directions to the conference location near the bottom of this page.

 

8:00 - 9:00 Registration and Continental Breakfast - Refreshments Served
9:00 - 9:30 General Session and Welcome - Roger Schrag, NoCOUG President
9:30 - 10:30 Keynote: The Future of High Availability - Juan Loaiza, Oracle Corporation
10:30 - 11:00 Break
  Auditorium Room 102 Room 103
11:00 - 12:00
Session 1
DB Time-based Oracle Performance Tuning: Theory and Practice by Uri Shaft and Graham Wood, Oracle Corporation Oracle Gems by Daniel Morgan, University of Washington Birds Do It: Migrating Forms to Java EE Web -- A Case Study by Peter Koletzke, Quovera
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:00
Session 2
Simplified SQL Performance Management with Automatic SQL Tuning and Real-Time SQL Monitoring by Pete Belknap, Oracle Corporation Web 2.0 by Bradley Brown, TUSC Whither Business Logic? by Avrom Roy-Faderman, Quovera
2:00 - 2:30 Break and Refreshments
Last chance to visit the vendors
2:30 - 3:30
Session 3
SQL Performance Analyzer: Testing the Impact of System Changes on SQL Performance by Khaled Yagoub, Oracle Corporation Resolving Conflict with the Arrow of Truth by Bradley Brown, TUSC Oracle Adaptive Access Manager: What, Why, How by Dan Norris, Piocon
3:30 - 4:00 Raffle
4:00 - 5:00
Session 4
What is New in Oracle SOA Suite by Clemens Utschig, Oracle Corporation Oracle Annoyances for Geeks: Deadlocks and Livelocks by Iggy Fernandez, Verizon Business High Availability Options for Oracle Database by Dan Norris, Piocon
5:00 - ??? NoCOUG networking and happy hour at Chris' New Harbor Bar, 150 Harbor Blvd, Belmont, CA 94002 Tel:(650)591-1881.
(Directions: Head South on Oracle Pkwy toward Marine World Pkwy - 01. mi, Turn right at Marine World Pkwy - 0.4 mi, Continue on Ralston Ave. - 0.2 mi, Take 101 South toward San Jose, slight right at Harbor Blvd - 0.6 mi, Arrive at 150 Harbor Blvd, on the right.)

Mark your calendar for NoCOUG's Spring Conference:
Thursday, May 15, 2008 at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Foster City.

 


 

Speaker Abstracts for Winter Conference

 

Keynote
“The Future of High Availability” - Juan Loaiza, Oracle Corporation


Your business needs to be online 24x7, 365 days a year. If critical applications, servers, or data become unavailable, your entire business could be jeopardized. Lost revenue, dissatisfied customers, penalties, and negative press will have a lasting effect on your organization's reputation. Oracle Database 11g can protect your business from negative outcomes due to planned and unplanned downtime, including the most common cause of failure - human error. In addition, Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture framework provides clear and concise guidance on implementing best practices using Oracle's proven high availability technologies. During this session, Juan will highlight Oracle's continuing evolution of technology for achieving high availability. He'll discuss recent development innovations and a roadmap to help your company invest in guarding against failures to meet your quality of service obligations at the lowest cost.

Auditorium
“DB Time-based Oracle Performance Tuning: Theory and Practice” - Uri Shaft and Graham Wood, Oracle Corporation


Oracle 10g formally introduced the fundamental concept of DB Time as part of the Server Manageability effort. This concept underlies or is significantly used by many of the manageability technologies of the Diagnostic and Tuning packs in both 10g and 11g, including ADDM, SQL Tuning Advisor, Access Advisor, and Enterprise Manager. Less prominently but no less importantly the concept of DB Time is intended to be used as the new lingua franca for Oracle performance tuning. This session will introduce the abstract theory of DB Time and its time-normalized sibling Average Active Sessions. The process of performance tuning using DB Time will be discussed and compared with other current methodologies including those based on wait-events and SQL trace. The session will discuss the Active Session History (ASH) technology and its critical relationship to quantifying the expenditure of DB Time in an active system across many dimensions of interest to performance analysts. The automatic analysis of DB Time by the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) is also discussed. Examples usages of Enterprise Manager's visualization of DB Time will also be presented.

“Simplified SQL Performance Management with Automatic SQL Tuning and Real-Time SQL Monitoring” - Pete Belknap, Oracle Corporation


SQL tuning is a critical aspect of database performance tuning. Unfortunately this has traditionally been an inherently complex activity, requiring a high level of expertise in multiple domains. Furthermore, SQL tuning is both time-consuming and repetitive due to the large volume and evolving nature of the SQL workload and the underlying data. Oracle 10g introduced the SQL Tuning Advisor to provide quick recommendations for solutions to common SQL performance problems, including the application of SQL profiles to transparently improve problematic execution plans without re-writing SQL. Oracle 11g automates this process through the Automatic SQL Tuning feature, wherein SQL Tuning Advisor runs automatically in system maintenance windows, tests its own recommendations, and can implement SQL profiles when they show a large performance improvement. The end result is that Oracle can now automatically recognize and fix many SQL performance problems with minimal or no human intervention. Monitoring long-running and complex SQL during execution and understanding where it spends execution time is another major challenge for the DBA. Simply finding long-running SQL executions can be difficult because statistics are typically aggregated across all executions. Parallel execution plans are particularly difficult to analyze as multiple sessions can simultaneously be working on them, possibly across multiple database instances in RAC environments. Drilling down to discover where time is spent at the plan operation level has also been almost impossible. Oracle 11g introduces the Real-Time SQL Monitoring feature to help the DBA by giving a complete and accurate picture of individual SQL executions by exposing the interesting new measurements at each stage of the execution pipeline. In this session we take a deep-dive into these two exciting new technologies and see specific examples where they help simplify SQL monitoring and tuning immensely. We will demonstrate how these features have lowered the barrier to entry for competent SQL tuning, introducing new approaches that are both more scientific and more accessible to the broad base of Oracle customers.

“SQL Performance Analyzer: Testing the Impact of System Changes on SQL Performance” - Khaled Yagoub, Oracle Corporation


SQL Performance Analyzer is a component of the Oracle 11g Real Application Testing option. This novel technology enables flexible testing of database change scenarios on SQL execution performance. System changes like database upgrade, initialization parameter settings, schema changes, and gathering optimizer statistics may affect many execution plans in a large workload. Today customers attempting to achieve positive benefits through system-level changes can sometimes end up with unanticipated side effects on the execution of some SQL or other due to the complexity of predicting all possible effects over workloads consisting of many SQL statements. SQL Performance Analyzer offers a comprehensive solution that enables users to forecast and analyze how a system change will impact SQL query plans over a large workload and assess the run time performance prior to production deployment. The technology identifies potential problems that may occur due to a change and provides solutions for avoiding degraded SQL performance that are predicted to occur under the change. As well, it measures performance benefits achievable by the change through quantitative estimates of the system's performance in the new environment with high confidence. This comparative analysis of SQL workload response time allows clear and easy assessment of the change. In this session we describe the architecture of the SQL Performance Analyzer, its usage model, and its integration points with other Oracle database components to form an end-to-end solution for managing SQL execution performance in the face of ever-changing system environments.

“What is New in Oracle SOA Suite” - Clemens Utschig, Oracle Corporation


This session provides an overview of the Service Component Architecture Assembly Model and how it simplifies the end-to-end lifecycle management of SOA composite applications. Application designers can now design, package, version, and manage their SOA composite applications (Web services, BPEL, Enterprise Service Bus flows, and the like) as one single entity. These capabilities will be illustrated with a demonstration of Oracle SOA Suite 11g.

Room 102
“Oracle Gems” - Daniel Morgan, University of Washington


Oracle Ace Director Daniel Morgan will present a variety of Oracle Gems ... 10g and 11g database features that have been hidden from view and that, with a little polish, may be of great value. The gems, some for developers, some for DBAs, will be presented live in SQL*Plus.

“Web 2.0” - Bradley Brown, TUSC


You've heard the term Web 2.0 and might be wondering exactly what it means to you and your business. You might be wondering what Web 2.0 includes. On the other hand, you might be right in the middle of it all, but noticing that more and more Oracle products seem to offer Web 2.0 entry points. Or maybe you're not using Oracle technology for anything but your backend database. You might be wondering which other products should be under consideration? Which should be avoided? What's a good entry point solution?

“Resolving Conflict with the Arrow of Truth” - Bradley Brown, TUSC


Have you ever run into a conflict at work or at home, but you had difficulty resolving the problem? By using the methods described in this presentation (the arrow of truth), you will be able to work through issues that otherwise may appear irresolvable. This method works not just at work, but at home too.

“Oracle Annoyances for Geeks: Deadlocks and Livelocks” - Iggy Fernandez, Verizon Business


Deadlocks are not well understood and the trace file generated by Oracle when a deadlock occurs suggests that a deadlock is a problem "due to user error in the design of an application or from issuing incorrect ad-hoc SQL." In fact, sessions can deadlock even if they are not contending for the same data and a session can even deadlock with itself! We discuss this and other misconceptions about deadlock and demonstrate multiple ways in which deadlock can occur.

Room 103
“Birds Do It: Migrating Forms to Java EE Web -- A Case Study” - Peter Koletzke, Quovera


This case study examines the migration of an enterprise-level, character-mode, Oracle Forms 6.0 application to Fusion ADF web technologies. It explains the decision points for choosing Fusion ADF and focuses on how ADF Business Components provided the core pivot point for an ADF user interface and PL/SQL back end business rules code. The presentation also describes and offers insight on the techniques used to migrate the skills of staff Forms developers to the new technologies. Finally, it lists successes and lessons learned along the way.

“Whither Business Logic?” - Avrom Roy-Faderman, Quovera


Where should you put business logic in your web applications? Database people will tell you it should go in the database; J2EE types will say it belongs in the model layer of the application. But there's more to this than a holy war; the question of where to put your business logic can be approached rationally, depending on features of the logic and application. This talk covers principles for placement of business logic in the database or application, as well as the question of logic in the client tier. The talk will also cover Oracle JDeveloper techniques for accommodating different business logic placement.

“Oracle Adaptive Access Manager: What, Why, How” - Dan Norris, Piocon


You're a hacker. You want data. Shouldn't be too hard--just guess a password or two and you can find lots of confidential information. If you're lucky, you'll find a weakly-secured web application and watch network traffic as someone logs in to find their username and password. Now that you have the credentials, all you need to do is login. When you attempt login, you find that you're denied access or maybe you're asked to type in the PIN code from your login token (which you don't have). This scene was brought to you by Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM). Oracle acquired Bharosa in October 2007 to fill the need for a real time fraud detection capability in the Oracle Identity Management Suite. OAAM uses a database of heuristics and pattern matching to find the "bad" guys. What happens to them is up to you, the OAAM administrator. Come to this session to learn how OAAM protects applications from fraudulent use without any client-side installation.

“High Availability Options for Oracle Database” - Dan Norris, Piocon


From Oracle RAC to cold backups, this session will introduce the various Oracle and third party features, products, and options that provide high availability for Oracle Database. IT Managers, DBAs, and system architects will benefit from the information provided in this technical session. To help you determine the best choice for your environment, we'll focus on the advantages and disadvantages of each option and discuss the factors that commonly influence the decision-making process.

 


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Directions to the Oracle Conference Center

Address:
350 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, California.  Phone: 650-633-8300 Fax: 650-633-8399

Southbound-
Take Highway 101 South (toward San Jose) to the Ralston Ave./Marine World Parkway exit.  Take Marine World Parkway east which will be left at the light.  Make a left onto Oracle Parkway.  350 Oracle Parkway will be on the right.

Northbound-
Take Highway 101 North (toward San Francisco) to the Ralston Ave./Marine World Parkway exit.  Take the first exit ramp onto Marine World Parkway.  Make a left at the first light onto Oracle Parkway.  350 Oracle Parkway will be on the right.  

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