That’s the title of my first presentation at 9:45 on Tuesday morning – tomorrow. I thought I’d write a brief blog about the presentation to help any Hotsos attendees decide if you want to attend.
The first thing to say is that this is the presentation I’ve given previously at UKOUG 2004, the UKOUG Unix SIG and OUG Scotland. If you attended one of those, you’ll have seen most of this before, although all three were too much of a rush at 45 (plus a few extra frantic) minutes, so 60 minutes will be better. The related article was published in Select magazine so if you’ve read that then there won’t be much for you either, apart from my dazzling presentation skills and razor-sharp wit!
I’m only doing this presentation as a last-minute fill-in to help out with an empty slot so I haven’t spent much time on updating it (which I could have, based on the recent playing around I’ve been doing). I have updated some of the parameter information for 10g and changed some of the emphasis on wait events based on recent experience. I’ll also be able to talk from a more qualified position than I have in the past, as my experience with PX has grown.
The presentation goes over what PX is for, the basic architecture of the thing, the parameters you need to set (or not) and some of the wait events you’ll see. To save it being a regurgitation of the documentation, I’ve included a couple of examples of strange problems that I’ve seen when working with it. Nothing too deep but a couple of things worth looking for. It wraps up with some common sense suggestions on how to use it which might well be the most important part of the presentation.
In a couple of cases I’ve decided to leave the slides as they are, saying things that I’ve now changed my view on, so that you can see my original thoughts and I can also explain why I’ve changed my mind.
When Cary asked me for a title, I went with something bland that included ‘Introduction’ in it so that people wouldn’t expect too much. That doesn’t mean it’s extremely basic but that it doesn’t cover any particular area in great depth. In fact, on reflection, a better word might have been ‘Overview’.
I suppose the best review I could give it is that both Jonathan Lewis and Julian Dyke have complimented me on it when they saw it at different UK events.
P.S. The best bit will be watching me have to stand up in front of Tom Kyte and disagree with him about something instead of being able to hide across the Atlantic Ocean! Now, if that isn’t a teaser, I don’t know what is 😉