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.

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

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!

Hotsos Symposium 2011

I'm back home from Hotsos Symposium 2011. This was the first symposium I attended. Like many other first time attendees, my immediate thought at the end of the event was "I can't believe I haven't come to this before."

The small size of the symposium made it much easier to feel like a part of the event. The larger events can sometimes leave attendees feeling like just another number. At Hotsos Symposium that was not the case.

The sessions were first rate. Many of the presenters are some of the top level presenters available. The sessions are performance centric which lends itself to broader topics such as system management, application developement, and capacity planning.

Rather than give details on the specific sessions I attended, I'd rather talk about the main trends I saw discussed. Certain topics were discussed in multiple sessions. These key topics were:

1. Statistics
There were numerous discussions about the importance of statistics. With the Cost Based Optimizer, Oracle is very dependent on having accurate statistics. If the statistics are not valid, then there can be significant impacts to system performance. The discussions covered new statistics features in 11g as well as how to validate existing statistics.

2. AWR/ASH
Multiple presenters discussed ways to mine the AWR data to solve problems as well as proactively monitor systems. These presentions hit home with me because I often focus on AWR data during troubleshooting and performance planning. One point of concern is that AWR/ASH require the Database Diagnostic Pack. Really Oracle, we have to pay extra to get access to useful diagnostic data? As another attendee said, "Use of these tools should be mandatory!"

3. Capacity planning, performance forecasting
These topics are a big area of concern for people these days. The sessions on these topics were often the most mathematically inclined talks. People should appreciate how difficult this can be. Workload impact growth is non-linear. In fact as the performance impact begins to occur the rate of growth of impact is exponential. Dr. Neil Gunther discussed how to forecast increased workload impact using a sample size of at least 6 data load tests.

Another thing that stood out for me was the humor in the presentations. A few of my favorite moments were when presenters were able to make a strong point in a funny way. In Kerry Osborne's presentation he presented on user trends which he admitted was not based on actual data, but represented his views on the topic. Frederich Pfeiffer had a good line about hardware sizing (note item #3 above). Discussing the importance of using realistic data in test envronments for capacity forecasts he said, "If there is a performance problem after going into production, you can't suggest reverting to the test data because that ran fine." Other humourist presentations included Gwen Shapira. and Dan Fink.

Beyond the fantastic presentations and Training Day with Karen Morton, the evening events were quite entertaining. The Monday night event sponsored by Netzella was a blast. On Tuesday night Hotsos provided a Cajun themed party that was very enjoyable. All of the other little things such as quality of the food, room quality, etc were first rate.

Next year will be the tenth anniversiry of the Symposium. This will be a great event, I strongly recommend attending.