Oracle Open World 2011

This year I have the opportunity to attend Oracle ACE Directors briefing before the Oracle Open World 2011 event which is taking place at Oracle Headquarters. It is great to get almost all important things which will be announced in several days packed together and communicated by those responsible people in Oracle. So I am really thankful for this opportunity. A lot of ACE Directors gathered here and it is nice to meet old friends and make personal contacts with all those who we know only by name.


My presentation titled "Getting The Best From The Cost Based Optimizer" is on Tuesday, October 4th at 1:15 PM in InterContinental - Grand Ballroom B and it looks like the room will be full so come there on time to get your seat.

Update on Chris Date's Seminar in Ljubljana May 23-24 2011

The registration for the seminar is now open and there is a substantial early bird registration discount. Beside this the members of Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian Oracle User Group have additional discount. Please see the details on www.dbprof.com about the seminar registration.

I tried really hard to organize this unique event at the affordable prices for everybody especially in times when the financial crisis is still striking the budget for education.

Interesting opinion about Chris Date's seminar in Ljubljana was published today by Dejan Sarka, worldwide known Slovenian expert for Microsoft SQL server . He wrote: "Well, IMHO C. J. Date is the most important contemporary theorist on the Relational Model. If there is a single person in the world I would like to listen, this is Date." ..."If you have opportunity to join the Date's seminar, do not hesitate! it is a unique opportunity, and I find the price, thanks to great organization of the DbProf company, very attractive." Details here. Because he is a speaker at Slovenian NT Conference which is unfortunately taking place at the same time, he is not able to attend this unique event.

Organizing Chris Date's seminar in Ljubljana May 23-24 2011

I have invited Chris J. Date, an independent author, lecturer, researcher, and consultant of international renown, specializing in relational database technology, to have a 2 day seminar "How to Write Correct SQL and Know It: A Relational Approach to SQL". The 2-day seminar will take place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on May 23-24 2011.

Chris is best known for his book "An Introduction to Database Systems" (eighth edition, Addison-Wesley, 2004), which has sold some 725,000 copies and is used by several hundred colleges and universities worldwide.
For more details about this seminar please read on my home page.

Why this seminar? So many times I am involved in performance troubleshooting and in more than 80% of all cases the fault is bad design and poorly written SQL statements. With organizing this event I would like to give a good opportunity to all developers (either on Oracle database or any other database) to get more theoretical knowledge about SQL.

Presenting at Croatian Oracle User Group - HROUG

This week I'll be presenting at Croatian Oracle User Group Conference (HROUG) which will take place in Rovinj in Croatia, a beautiful old city in Istria at the Adriatic coast.

HROUG is a very strong and active user group. Every year they organize excellent conference, so this year it is already the 15th. Last year I was presenting about execution plan stability and my presentation was selected as the best presentation in the "Database and Technology" track.

Rovinj is only about 2.5 hour drive away from my home in neighbor country. My presentation is scheduled for Thursday, 21.10.2010 at 15:00 hours and I will repeat my presentation from Oracle Open World 2010. Friday morning I'll be talking about the Oracle ACE Program together with other Oracle ACEs / ACE Directors who will be there as well. Currently Croatia has no Oracle ACE yet. Therefore the Croatian Oracle User Group would like to make people aware of this Oracle program and at the same time they would like to discuss their first nominations.

Query Transformations - follow up

Despite the doubts about the topic "Query Transformations" (described in my previous post) presented at OOW which was quite technical I found extremely nice comments in different blog posts written by the attendees of my presentation. Thanks for sharing that with others. I was really happy and at same time surprised to have the room almost full and I hope everybody has learned at least something useful.

For those, who don't have access to presentations at OOW 2010 I uploaded the presentation to my home site and it is ready for download. You have to login (or register first if you have no login yet).

Stanley at OOW 2010

Yesterday, on Tuesday September 21st, I met with Debra Lilley, Robyn Sands, Mogens Norgard and Dan Norris at the Chevys. When we exited I took some funny pictures of Dan, Debra and Mogens and, of course, Stanley-Oracle ACE Director. And I'm pretty sure everybody knows Stanley. If not, go to his home page and learn more about him.

My Oracle Open World 2010 Presentation - "Query Transformations"

This year I have a presentation titled "Query Transformations" in Moscone South, Room 300 on Thursday, September 23 at 12:00. In last years I had done a similar presentation several times at different conferences. However, this presentation contains new transformations which came in Oracle 11gR2. The list of query transformations I will talk about is the following:

–

–JPPD - join predicate push-down
–FPD - filter push-down
–PM - predicate move-around
–CVM - complex view merging
–SPJ - select-project-join
–SJC - set join conversion
–SU - subquery unnesting
–OBYE - order by elimination
–CNT - count(col) to count(*) transformation
–JE - Join Elimination
–JF - join factorization

Especially the last one added in 11gR2 is quite interesting and has the background in the patent registration application which could be found here. Another very interesting source of information is the paper presented by several Oracle employees at VLDB'09 which is available here. During the whole presentation I am showing excerpts from CBO trace file in order that the audience can learn how CBO reports about performed transformation. Some useful pieces about transformations are also available in Optimizer Development Team blog.

According to number of enrolled attendees it looks like the room will be almost full. Yesterday I had a discussion with Mohamed Zait who is in the Optimizer development team and he was surprised that the topic about query transformations is so interesting for OOW attendees. My personal opinion shared also by many others is that the content of too many presentations at OOW contains just a "helicopter" view of what is available but doesn't show or explain anything what is going on "behind the scene". However, with great pleasure I must admit that I was able to find some very good presentation during last 3 days what just confirms the fact that the speakers feel the need to go beyond the "usual" level of expertize and I am very thankful for that. One of such presentation was prepared by Maria Colgan titled "Explaining the Explain Plan: Interpreting Execution Plans for SQL Statements" where I haven't heard some new stuff but liked very much the way she presented the topic and the contents of the presentation. One of the very important messages she gave was that people should not change database parameters unless they really know what they are doing. She especially mentioned famous OPTIMIZER_INDEX_COST_ADJ which should be left at it's default value of 100. I was missing at least some words about system statistics. The other one I found also very interesting was "Oracle Database Performance Secrets Finally Revealed" presented by Greg Rahn and Michael Hallas.

My presentation is available for downloading at my home site. You have to login in (or register first if you have no login yet).