I’ve been a bit busy recently because I’ve had a rolling 4 week cold (like lots of people in the office – obviously several colds in quick succession), a couple of presentations at UKOUG (where I’m sure the additional beer didn’t help recovery) and then I was in Vienna on Monday and Tuesday this week, teaching the 10g Performance course for Oracle Austria. <\/p>\n
Personally I was a bit disappointed with my efforts because I could only see areas for improvement but that means that I’ve got the opportunity to do better next time. It’s true I’m naturally self-critical though and the reaction of the attendees seemed pretty good. They were a smart bunch, too, which I can always tell by the standard of questions and I’m pleased that one of those smart guys, Martin Berger<\/a>, seemed reasonably content<\/a>. I have a feeling he’s a guy I’ll be seeing presenting at some conference or other in the near future. The food was excellent, the conversation stimulating and Vienna is a smoker’s heaven! (for now …)<\/p>\n Oh, and I forgot to take a photo of the class for a blog post, but my mind really wasn’t on blogging this week …<\/p>\n With the performance basics presentation, the course, and the fact I’ve been looking at a few performance issues at work in between, performance has been on my mind even more than usual lately and I kept spotting related blog posts, too.<\/p>\n First up was Glenn Fawcett’s post sharing his Oracle Performance Analysis 101<\/a> presentation that he developed for delivery to his Sun colleagues. It’s pretty good, practical stuff for the right audience and I can imagine I’ll point colleagues to it in future.<\/p>\n There was also a minor flurry of posts around Data Warehouse appliance vendor’s benchmarking claims. Kevin Closson posted an interesting little puzzle<\/a> that illustrated the folly of placing too much faith (faith being an appropriate word) in those ‘100x faster’ claims. Kurt the Dude guy<\/a> picked the reason for the stunning performance gain<\/a>. If I’d had my wits about me and taken time to read it, I would have had a chance too because I experienced a self-inflicted performance problems with some PX testing I was doing a while back when I set PCTFREE to 90 to inflate the space used by a test table. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it meant a lot of i\/o activity, but not much action when the data was aggregated! Actually, what I thought was clever about Kevin’s posts was that he put Exadata head-to-head with Exadata and gained a 485% improvement! 😉 Food for thought, particularly just after I’d repeated some 5-10x improvement Exadata results! Fair point.<\/p>\n Then Greg Rahn added a couple<\/a> of his own posts<\/a> on some of the more bizarre vendor claims. Of course it would be easy to say that both Kevin and Greg have a personal stake in the success of Exadata and so maybe they’re just biased? But they’re not marketing guys, that’s for sure, and they haven’t made those go-faster claims without some explanation about where the go-faster comes from.<\/p>\n Finally, someone on the course asked how they could invalidate individual cursors on demand and I said I didn’t think you could. The next morning, Martin came in and said he thought there was a way you could do it, at which point I immediately remember Fairlie Rego’s post<\/a> that I’d read last year. If there’s one good side-effect of blogging, it’s that it increases the chance I’ll remember these things in future! (No guarantee, though …) So, here’s Martin’s follow-up post<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rather than performance, I suppose I’d better start thinking about Christmas now! 😉<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"