|
American DBA Online's
Technical Seminar
November 2006
American DBA Online
successfully held the third large technical seminar of the year in Clarion
hotel in Edison, NJ Saturday 11/11/2006. It was a warm and
sunshiny late autumn weekend day. Still, over 80 experienced Oracle DBAs and IT professionals attended this meeting. They
were attracted to the event by the interesting topics and high-quality
presenters.
It is the 7th
year for American DBA Online, as proudly pointed out by the president of
American DBA Online organization – Mr. David Wang in his opening remarks.
DBA Online survived the low of the Internet bubble days, and is thriving
high on the rebound of the IT market. Our membership passed the 1,000 mark
and we’ve had more industry sponsors including Oracle Corporation! Our
success can’t happen without our members’ dedication, our presenters’
community services, giving spirit, and our sponsors’ generous support!
We invited Mr. Sean Hull
as the keynote speaker. Sean’s topic was Diagnosing Bottlenecks in Your
Database. Sean is the founder and senior consultant at Heavyweight
Internet Group based in New York
City. He frequently presents at other Oracle
professional groups such as NYOUG. Inspired by a PERL-based, command-line
tool for Unix – Otop (as the name implies, it’s
based on the popular Unix “top” utility), Sean is the advocate for a
PERL-based, command-line monitoring and diagnostic tool for Oracle database
– Mtop. Mtop gives you
many facts and statistics about your database’s performance at a glance.
It’s a more graphical and easier way to query the Oracle Wait Interface. In
his presentation, Sean also talked about various Oracle
wait events, what wait events to look out for, how to identify some typical
bottlenecks, and how to use OTop and MTop to tackle the problems. If you’re interested in OTop and Mtop, or want to
contribute to enhancing the freeware tools, please contact Sean at shull@iheavy.com. Sean also brought five
copies of the book that he co-authored: Oracle and Open Source
(2001, O’Reilly & Associates) for raffle.
FalconStor Software, Inc. offers an array of proven data
protection & storage solutions for large and medium enterprises. Their
main products & services include Continuous Data Protection (CDP),
Virtual Tape Library and Network Storage Servers. With more and bigger
Oracle databases in your company, reliable and speedy daily backups are
essential. Storage consolidation most likely is of your concern too. After
9/11, disaster recovery and business continuity become never more
important. FalconStore specializes in these
touchy areas. The Vice President of Network Storage Solutions for FalconStor – Mr. Donald Mead gave a presentation on how
FalconStor software works, how it achieves fast
and reliable data replication to remote site(s) in a smart way - by
maintaining a baseline and then transmitting the delta, changes only. Their
products have been deployed by a wide range of Fortune 1000 enterprises.
The company of one of our members purchased this software and is happy with
the performance. If you need reference, please contact Mr. David Wang. If
you want to learn more about the products & services, please feel free
to contact the Regional Sales Director – Mr. Jason Lin at 718-888-7809, Jason.lin@falconstor.com.
Besides sponsoring for
this event, FalconStor also brought a HP PhotoSmart printer worth $250 and some USB pen-drive
for raffle. Our member, Frank Huang, was the lucky winner for the printer.
Some audiences regretted that they didn’t sign up and missed the drawing
opportunity. So next time, please remember to sign up with our vendors
first.
The second half of the
seminar was for panel discussion focusing on database performance tuning.
All four panelists were technical managers or senior principal consultants
(past or present) from Oracle Corporation, and they were Ms. Jayne Chu, Mr.
David Wang, Mr. John Gao and Mr. Jingnan Zhou. Ms. Jayne Chu is a technical manager at
the data warehouse division of Oracle Corporation. She gave a presentation
on Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) 10gR2 – a Single Comprehensive Tool for
All Aspects of Data Management. She also gave a demo for how to create and
maintain three types of Slowing Changing Dimensions by using OWB.
The gold-medal Oracle
instructor Mr. David Wang still stays very technical and hands-on after so
many years. Based on the personal experience for the projects that he
recently worked on, David summarized the top 10 performance tricks for
Oracle 10g migration. Many companies are believed to be in full swing for
Oracle 10g migration right now. So his tips are in time for help and
reference, and may save you a lot of frustration and efforts. The #10 trick
was to use the Oracle supplied package DBSM_STATS to analyze all schemas
with different percentage of sample data in order to achieve the best
performance. The #1 trick was that for those very few SQLs
that running slower after Oracle 10g migration, you can still do alter
session to use 9i optimizer! To learn about the rest, please log on to http://www.dbaonline.org later for his
presentation materials.
Mr. John Gao is a senior principal consultant at Oracle
Corporation. He has over 17 years of diverse experience in Oracle database
and information systems. John presented on the common Oracle performance
issues. Based on the statistics that he collected, John categorized the
common performance issues into data modeling mistakes such as inappropriate
normalizations, programming missteps such as not using bind variables or
inefficient function calls, and database configurations. He also talked
through how to deal with or correct the issues as an Oracle DBA.
Mr. Jingnan
Zhou is a technical manager of the Service-Oriented Architecture group in
Oracle Advanced Technology Solutions. He gave us an overview of the Oracle
Times Ten In-memory database and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and
how these new technologies could boost the application performance. Oracle
Times Ten In-memory database is a new product acquired by Oracle
Corporation and is generally installed in the application tier. As an
Oracle DBA, you can definitely benefit from knowing what it is and how it
works, so you can make the most appropriate recommendations to your clients
– the application developers instead of being solely and wrongly blamed for
poor database performance.
This seminar was also
sponsored by Ms. Joyce Qi Huang – an AXA
financial advisor. Besides boosting your database performance, if you want
to boost your personal financial performance, please consult with Ms. Joyce
Qi Huang in Morristown,
NJ.
Soon it’s that time of
year again. We wish you a happy holiday season in advance!
DBA Online Committee
|
