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Oracle Open World -- Day Two

Day Two started in a much more traditional way, with a more traditional focus. Database. Database. Database

Oracle NoSQL an Oracle Database Working Together
Pretty much anyone on the Database track knows Oracle RDBMS pretty well. However, understanding of what NoSQL is, and how it may fit as a solution within an organziation is still a mystery to some.

NoSQL is a key-based datastore that is used in applications which require fast read or write operations, without the need for 100% consistency. This is different than reliability, but that's a topic for another day. NoSQL can be used to store or supply information to applications where it typical latency associated with an heavy RDBMS would be considered unacceptable.

NoSQL is also part of the systems associated with Hadoop and other Big Data solutions.

High Volume Text Indexing with Oracle Text: A Guide for Developers
I attended a lab session on this topic yesterday. These sessions seemed to have been scheduled out of order, it was intereesting none the less. Having implemented text indexes on Day One, learned a bit more depth as to what I implemented was clearly interesting and informative.


Real World Performance Dilemmas in Middleware
The Real World Performance Team sessions should be required for any System Architects, App Admins and Database Admins. I attended three sessions last year, and this session this year, and they were ALL gold.

The focus of these sessions, was to point out systems problems are as much about systems as they are about interactions with groups of people within an organization. In the uses cases discussed, they showed how a decisions (such as load balance everything) are not always the best. In fact, affinity is almost always the preferred architecture for performance. I say almost because a true DBA never speaks in absolutes.

The second main point of this presentation is to understand the change you are putting in place. And by understand, put metric and facts on the table BEFORE making the change.


Oracle Optimizer Boot Camp: 10 Optimizer Tips You Can't Do Without
Maria Colgen and Jonathan Lewis are both extraordinarily knowledgeable and wonderful public speakers. The title of this session was slightly misleading, because the tips weren't for the optimizer, they were for the DBA/Developer to use in order to find the correct execution plan.

The Optimizer is, what it is. It makes assumptions for execution plans based on the information it knows. As Developer/DBA, it's your job to make sure the Optimizer knows your data as well as do you. And if you don't know your data, and the Optimizer doesn't know your data, then you're going to have a bad time.

There are two main facilities for the Optimizer to 'know your data': Statistics and Histograms. While Maria and Jonathan (we are on a first name basis now) have some slightly differing opinions on the how do to this, they can agree that the best plan is the one that provides you the results you desire and the fastest retrieval time. Once that plan is 'discovered', save it, lock it down, and never  lose it. At that point, the optimizer is done, and the problem becomes one of SQL Plan Management.

ALl in all, a fantastic day. Back at it again.

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