Urge to Purge part 1

Purge is a four letter word in many organizations. Resistance to purging data is understandable. The technical staff will be at odds with the functional groups if there is ever a time when needed data is no longer available.

The penalty against purging is performance degredation and additional storage requirements. The additional storage also has an adverse effect on backup and recovery operations. In addition to purchasing additional storage, companies often have to purchase additional CPU which can also impact licensing costs.

If you're not sure of the best place to start your purge investigation, for EBS customers you should be purging as much of the Concurrent Request histor and Workflow history as possible. Next you should investigate the purging options for the features that are most heavily used at your site.

If you are unsure of which modules result in excessive storage usage, then check for the largest objects in your database. Based upon the tables returned, you can then use My Oracle Support to check for appropriate purge routines.

A simple query to check for the 50 largest objects:
select owner,segment_name, segment_type, bytes
from (select owner,segment_name, segment_type, bytes, rank() over
(order by bytes desc
) as rank from dba_segments
) where rank <=50;

Hotsos Symposium 2013

Good news! I found out today that I will get to present at the 2013 Hotsos Symposium. I was slotted in as a fill-in speaker for another presentation that had to cancel.

The Symposium is always a great event. This conference focuses totally on practical performance tuning and database management topics. I'm proud to be part of the company that hosts this event. Last year's Tenth Annual event was great.

My presentation, "Hunting Down Performance Problems", is suitable for beginner - intermediate level DBAs. The presentation will focus on examples of performance problem identification and resolution. I hope to see some of you there.

For more information see -My Speaker profile

OOW 2013 Update

Oracle Open World is coming up very soon. If you are going, be sure to stop by the EBS Application Technology Stack SIG meeting on Sunday. The details for the meeting are:

Sunday, September 30th
10:30 to Noon
Moscone West 3018

As usual, there will be a lot of great content from Oracle provided during the SIG meeting. The Special Interest Group meeting typically allow for more interaction with the speakers and other attendees.

Speaking of conferences, the Hotsos Symposium is taking submissions for next years conference.

Symposium speaker submission

If you are not interested in speaking, you can still register to attend.

Also, on the Hotsos front, be sure to check out the latest newsletter. There are a lot of big updates from Hotsos.

Hotsos Newsletter

My COLLABORATE 12 Session

I had a lot of fun presenting my topic to the attendees at COLLABORATE 12 this year in Vegas.
My presentation can be found at the following location:
http://mwsig.oaug.org/WhitePapers/keep_it_simple_pjackson.pdf

There are a lot of My Oracle Support notes and SQL commands included in the presentation. Check them out and let me know if you have any questions or issues.

COLLABORATE 12 Info

After a very informative and enjoyable Hotsos Symposium, the next educational opportunity for me is COLLABORATE 12 in Las Vegas.

There are a couple of sessions worth specific mentioning in the blog.

1. On Monday 4/23, I will be presenting a Performance Tuning session called "Keep it Simple - Common, Overlooked Performance Tuning Tips". The session will be from 9:45 AM - 10:45 AM in South Seas E. I will be covering a variety of performance tuning tips and recommendations.

2. Also on Monday 4/23, The OAUG EBS Applications Technology SIG will be presenting a two part SIG meeting from 2:30 PM - 4:45 PM in South Seas F. During this SIG meeting there will be two high quality presentations from Oracle. For EBS customers, attend one or both meetings. I have been a board member of the EBS Applications Technology SIG since its inception. I currently serve as the vice-president of the board.

I hope to see you at COLLABORATE 12.

Hotsos Symposium Update

Hotsos has sent the following information out in an email. I wanted to post on this site in case any of you are not on the email list. Here is the body of the message:

Hotsos Symposium 2012 is just around the corner and the early registration discount expires this Friday (February 10, 2012).  Register now for a fun week in Dallas with the world’s top Oracle performance talent.

We are tweeting about Hotsos Symposium this year.  Follow @hotsosgg or #HotSym12 to keep up-to-date on Symposium events and what our speakers have to say.

Once again we have a great line-up of speakers.  You'll want to hear returning speakers Tom Kyte, Tanel Poder, Alex Gorbachev, Doug Burns, Cary Millsap, Tim Gorman, Maria Colgan, Neil Gunther, Wolfgang Breitling and many more.  New speakers this year include Baron Schwartz, Carlos Sierra, Iordan Iotzov and more.  Visit https://webmail.hotsos.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://cts.vresp.com/c/?HotsosEnterprisesLtd/df35405401/37d4d9c301/b115417b12 for the complete list.

Jonathan Lewis is leading the optional Training Day on March 8, 2011.  His topic is “Designing Optimal SQL”.  Read more about this topic at https://webmail.hotsos.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://cts.vresp.com/c/?HotsosEnterprisesLtd/df35405401/37d4d9c301/7724722b2f.

For more information, contact us at +1.817.488.6200 x520 or symposium@hotsos.com. We're looking forward to seeing you all!

Year End Updates

Hope everybody enjoyed their holidays and has a great new year.

It's time for a few updates:
1. My presentation for COLLABORATE12 has been accepted. It will be good to be back in front of an audience to present at a user group. My presentation is Keep It Simple. The idea behind it is that I will cover some simple, often overlooked database tuning steps. My desire to present such a topic came about from the work this past year where I've performed database tuning at many different client sites. After seeing some of the same issues come up over and over, I decided there would be value in such a presentation.

2. The Hotsos Symposium is coming up in March. If you haven't registered yet, look into it. This is a really good event that focus on tuning. The information presented and the access to experts makes it a real value.

3. My Oracle Support has announced some changes to their interface. This site is a critical stop for any Oracle DBA, so you need to be aware of any such changes. Oracle has provided a note to keep us informed. Monitor that note for any additional information