4th Dutch Planboard Oracle DBA Symposium
Posted by Harald van Breederode on November 19, 2009
Last Tuesday I presented at, and attended, the 4th Dutch Planboard Oracle DBA Symposium and here are my impressions about this wonderful 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 by Yuri van Buren who gave a presentation on performance forecasting. Yuri started by introducing several mathematical forecasting models and continued with examples on how to use them in real world scenario’s. He did a fantastic job on describing the formulas and graphics on the screen to me, remember that I am blind, to help me understand what was going on. Thank you Yuri!
After the coffee break I attended Nienke Gijsen’s session who presented a performance case where the Oracle server created 75000+ child cursor’s for a SQL statement with system generated bind variables. She started by describing the symptoms followed by several pieces of theory on cursor sharing, histograms and bind variable peeking. Nienke continued explaining how these three features work together and in which situations they can cause serious performance problems. Mrs. Planboard concluded her session with live demos proving the above and gave a few tips on how to prevent this performance problem in the future. Well done Nienke!
After lunch I attended a session about securing the Oracle HTTP server presented by Frits Hoogland. He started by explaining TCP/IP basics on connection establishment and demonstrated this using a network sniffer. Frits continued by explaining what a firewall is, what it can do and more important what it can’t do. After this it became clear that one should secure the HTTP server by using a combination of system hardening and implementing security features inside the HTTP server itself. Frits ended his session by concluding that administering and securing a HTTP server is a task that doesn’t fit easily in the DBA skill set and therefore should probably be left to dedicated security experts.
The last session I attended was brought by Ingo Wevers who presented an introduction to Oracle Streams. Ingo begun his talk by positioning Oracle Streams and gave a brief overview of the Streams architecture followed by a sample implementation. After demonstrating the sample implementation he concluded his session by sharing a few tips and tricks.
Finally it was time for me to present my own Oracle Database 11g: Data Guard New Features in Action presentation. The title says it all, I explained the Data Guard new features and demonstrated the most important ones live. I recorded the demo output. Traditionally I overran my allotted time, but I managed to keep it to only 15 minutes ;-)
The day ended with a dinner for all attendees, speakers and supporting staff after which we all went home after yet another successful symposium.
I am looking forward to the 5th edition of the Planboard DBA Symposium to be held on June 8, 2010. If you were not able to attend this time, make sure that you can next time (and learn Dutch if you do not understand this language at present!)
-Harald
