3rd Dutch Planboard Oracle DBA Symposium
Posted by Harald van Breederode on May 27, 2009
Yesterday I presented at, and attended, the 3rd Dutch Planboard Oracle DBA Symposium and here are my impressions about this well attended event.
The symposium offered ten presentations, divided into two parallel tracks with each presentation taking approximately one hour. All presentations featured hard-core DBA topics or topics very closely related to DBA work.
The first session I attended was from Rene Kundersma who gave the audience an introduction to Grid Fundamentals. Rene started by booting his Oracle VM environment from an USB stick and continued with booting his Linux virtual machine which hosted his presentation. This “No Guts, No Glory” style is typical for Rene and I must admit that I like it. After this brave demo Rene talked about the different virtualization solutions in general and Oracle VM in particular. He continued by talking about different shared storage techniques, persistent device naming and other deep technical stuff. Well done Rene!
After the coffee break I attended a session about Rolling Release upgrades using a transient Logical Standby Database presented by Paul der Kinderen. Paul discussed the reasons why someone would use this technique to upgrade their database from one release to another and under what circumstances this technique is applicable. Paul clearly knew what he was talking about and warned us that one should not undergo this procedure without well preparation which includes reading lots of documentation and white papers as well as one (and probably more) test runs to get the procedures in your fingers.
During lunch I took the opportunity to talk to several attendees and, as a member of the program committee, asked about their opinion so far and I only received very positive feedback.
The next session I attended was “APEX for DBA’s” presented by Toon Koppelaars. I had no prior experience with APEX and Toon succeeded in explaining the concepts one needs to understand before starting with APEX and he continued by building a little “kill session”-application. Despite the fact that APEX is a graphical tool (and that I am blind) I could easily follow the demonstration because he has a pretty verbose way of presenting by not only clicking around with his mouse but also explain verbally what is going on.
The last session I attended was about optimizing redo shipment and redo apply in a Data Guard environment presented by Rick van Eck. This presentation is based on a customer case where Rick was involved in setting up and maintaining an Oracle Data Guard environment which consisted of a primary database and just one physical standby database located at a remote site connected by a Wide Area Network (WAN) with too little bandwidth. Rick explained the techniques he used to setup the standby and the solution to circumvent the bandwidth shortage by using Secure Shell (SSH) tunnels. Rick concluded his session by discussing redo gaps, how to detect them and how to resolve them after which he gave a nice demo to support his presentation.
Finally it was time for me to present my own “SQL Plan Management” presentation. My session started by explaining the reasons for execution plan changes and discussing the various techniques that are available to prevent unwanted plan changes. I discussed hints, Optimizer Plan Stability and the new Oracle11g SQL Plan Management. I concluded my session with a lengthy demo showing everything one needs to know about SQL Plan Management. In tradition with last year I overran my allotted time by almost 30 minutes which included 10 minutes of darkness due to a unplanned outage of the Audio and Video system which in turn made perfectly clear who in reality is visually impaired ;-)
The symposium ended with a shared dinner with all attendees, speakers and supporting staff where each of us had the opportunity to finish up any left open discussions started earlier during the day.
In conclusion I look back at yet another successful symposium and I am looking forward to the 4th edition to be held on November the 17th. In case you want to present at this “For Dutch DBA’s, by Dutch DBA’s” symposium please drop me a note.
-Harald
