Hotsos Symposium 2016 Wrap-up

Another Hotsos symposium is in the books. There were a so many great sessions that it is hard to quickly outline things. In addition to the presentations, there was a wonderful Training Day by Richard Foote.

The topic of indexes (Richard Foote's training day material) is more vast than we realize when doing day-to-day work in Oracle. Richard went through a great deal of information on indexing. During the course of his day long session he debunked many widely held myths about indexes. For example, is it best with a composite index to have the most selective values at the start of the index? Are you sure about that...?

This basic information is critical to supporting an Oracle system. A long standing belief of mine is that people should spend more time on the fundamentals of database design and performance rather than going down rabbit holes of features or techniques that are often not really needed. Many times I see people using these rare techniques to resolve issues that sometimes have much simpler fixes.

Throughout the conference there were a mix of presentations from veteran presenters and new participants. The typical big names including Tanel Poder, Kerry Osborne, Jeff Smith, et al provided the high quality presentations we are used to seeing from them. As usual for the Hotsos Symposium, the content was performance centric however it covered a wide variety of topics.

The training day wrapped up the Symposium but the start was from Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman and ThatJeffSmith on the importance of social media presence. Their presentation served to remind me of how infrequent I have been blogging and interacting in the social media space lately. As a result of their wonderful presentation, I will be working on doing more than a just few blog posts a year.

In addition to the increased social media activity I also plan on being more active with presentations and articles. I have done quite a bit in the past, but have taken a little bit of a break lately.

I guess that is the sign of a good conference... Being more energized when it is over.