My Hotsos Agenda

I’m a bit surprised how excited I am about going to Dallas for the Hotsos Symposium next week (have I mentioned it yet?). I’ve already worked my personal agenda out but it hasn’t been easy with two streams of equally high quality presentations. The full schedule is here and here’s what I’ve settled on for now.

Monday
9:45 Thomas Kyte on Instrumentation. I’ve heard that this bloke’s pretty good (but I’m also tempted by the DBMS_STATS presentation.)

11:00 Sane SAN by James Morle. I’ve read this paper in the past, I think, but the subject is close to my heart and I haven’t seen him present it.

13:00 Inside RAC by Julian Dyke. Having watched Julian try to present an introduction to RAC in about 25 minutes in Scotland, I’m looking forward to seeing him properly

14:15 Analytic Functions and Block Revisits by Jim Tommaney. This one just looks interesting!

15:30 Lessons Learned Version 2006.03 by Cary Millsap. I’ve admired Cary’s work since I started out with Oracle, so it’ll be a treat to see him present for the first time. He’ll be talking about the Magic of ‘2’, amongst other things.

Tuesday
8:30 Bob Sneed on I/O Microbenchmarking. I’ve heard great things about Bob from ex-colleagues at Sun and the subject’s right up my street, too.

9:45 I suppose I’ll need to attend the Parallel Execution one 😉 This was a last minute addition to help fill an available slot. I’ll probably blog a bit more about what you can expect before the day itself.

11:00 I’m definitely torn between the two streams here as I know that both are likely to be great. Knowing what I’m like immediately after speaking though, I might need a sit down and look over the two papers later!

13:00 SQL Profiles. This is a subject I don’t know much about yet and as one of the tech reviewers on Jonathan Lewis’ CBO book, I think Christian Antognini probably knows his stuff! (But then, I could say that about everyone on the agenda �)

14:15 V$ and X$. I always enjoy listening to Jonathan present, always learn something and personally I’m looking forward to a non-CBO presentation! (I’m sure Jonathan will be, too)

15:30 Torn again, but I’ll probably go for Moans Nogood � “No, Cary, We’re STILL not Tuning the Right SQL Statements” on the basis that there are likely to be a few laughs in there as well as contentious argument 😉

Wednesday
8:30 God, how do I choose here? I might plump for Tanel Poder talking about Advanced Research Techniques because I have some knowledge of Tom Kyte’s work on the LOG ERRORS clause already.

9:45 Karen Morton’s ‘When the Truth is not Persuasive’ sounds right up my street. I’m really looking forward to this one as I hope it’ll be a nice variation in tone and subject from the bulk of the three days.

11:00 At this point I’d planned to attend the two Applied Mathematics for Database Practitioners presentations but I reckon my head will be hurting quite a bit by then and I’m not sure I can cope with a double dose. I have my eye on the book when it comes out anyway, because I know this is a big weakness of mine. So I think I’ll take the easier (for me) option as it’s the last day. I’ve seen Stephan Haisley present once before, loved one of his papers that I read a while back and his presentation on Diagnostic Practices is very applicable to my day-to-day job. I think I’ll know a lot of it already, but hope to pick up a few things.

13:00 So, having skipped Maths (it has an ‘S’ on the end, folks 😉 ), that implies that I’ll be going to see Jared Still � ‘Normalise for Performance’. Again, Jared’s a name I’ve known for a long time, but I’ve never seen him present.

14:15 My second presentation on PX. This is the new one that I’ve struggled away with. There’s no way I can present 55 pages in an hour though, so I think I’ll say more on my plans for this presentation later this week. (The good news is that everyone will be listening to Jonathan Lewis next door!)

15:30 Cary Millsap on Capacity Planning will be an interesting way to wrap up and hopefully I’m still in a fit state!

If previous experience is anything to go by, I might miss a few presentations here and there or change my choices, but this is pretty close.

I’ve already assured Peter Scott that I’ll be blogging from the event, for those who can’t be there.