A very quick note - there's a very long one on Streams coming, with real code and everything, to say that Carl Backstrom's family have updated his blog with details of how to give in memoriam to this most excellent technologist and evangelist. Go here and donate appropriately please.

I recently spent a rather pleasant day at the scottish conference of the ukoug. This was held at the Radisson SAS Hotel just by the central rail station and split into a number of streams, from management through to dba. The organisation of the event was excellent, particularly given the fact that some of the infrastructure for various exhibitors didn't actually arrive until about 3 in the morning of the day of the event.

I was there primarily to give one of my newer presentations Is Oracle Smarter than Your DBA?, which isn't actually intended as a snub to your DBA team, but rather a plea for more traditional dbas to consider smartly using the automation features, and enterprise management offering from Oracle to reduce the amount of time spent in mundane routine checks and actions, so that the expensive and well trained brains of your DBAs can be devoted to high value actvities, for example design advice, rather than easily automated maintenance - for example adding datafiles. I'll also be giving this presentation, but hopefully in a much more polished manner at the annual conference in Birmingham. The current version is shown below (may take some time to load.)

I've been following a number of threads on forums.oracle.com recently - the quality of discussion seems to have improved markedly there since I gave up on it in 2001. Anyway there was a thread about interpreting the AWR report that Oracle provides (at extra cost) and which is very smilar to the Statspack report. The report in question comes from a siebel system and there were some interesting snippets of information from Joe Coffey about the specifics of working with SIEBEL which would likely trap the unwary (like me) when using sqlplus to investigate an application performance problem. The specifics are in this post but are that siebel specifically alters the standard oracle environment on login with 4 ALTER SESSION statements - namely

• alter session set optimizer_mode = first_rows_10;
• alter session set hash_join_enabled = false;
• alter session set "_optimizer_sortmerge_join_enabled" = false;=
• alter session set "_optimizer_join_sel_sanity_check" = true;

Now first_rows_10 is rather sensible for a reporting application where the end user is going to look at pages of results - I'm rather less convinced about the wisdom of avoiding hash_joins and sortmerge joins altogether, but the base point to remember here - for myself as much as any reader - is that when conducting tests using sqlplus (or toad or any other query environment ) it matters that you ensure that your session mimics effectively the one the users will be using.  

I'm just starting an installation of Oracle APEX 3.1.1 into one of our development ebs instances for 2 reasons.

1. To provide a small applet to a project team
2. To provide the infrastructure for the dbas to write their own little applets.

I chose this method for the following reasons (unordered)

• it's fairly cool
• we know pl/sql much better than java
• we don't much like forms.
• you can integrate really easily.
• deployment is pretty simple.

Those of you that have installed apex frequently will know it's a pretty quick install on decent hardware. So the following came as rather a surprise.

timing for: English Dictionary
Elapsed: 00:03:16.71
-- Updating user account expiration. -------
timing for: Upgrade
Elapsed: 00:00:00.43
...End of install if runtime install
...create null.sql
timing for: Development Installation
Elapsed: 01:03:48.57

That's right over an hour. The reason for this is that with 3.1.1 APEX calls DBMS_STATS.GATHER_DICTIONARY_STATS('APEX'); this spend almost 55 minutes performing inappropriate index lookups on the data dictionary for us. This might be solvable, though to be honest it's probably not worth it, but just a heads-up really, the APEX install may take longer than you think in a large environment and with the latest version of the software.

A good day today. I was privileged enough to be at the paper selection day for the UKOUG conference in December 2008. For those who don't know what happens, and perhaps suspect some sort of elite giving themselves presentation slots, here is roughly how it works. 

Firstly a reasonably large group of reviewers from around the world, though naturally UK biased,  score your abstract on a scale from 1 (very poor) to 6 (excellent). They also have an opportunity to comment. These scores are then collated and a small team review the scores and allocate presentations to available slots. The purpose of the 2nd review is twofold - first it allows the team to review the agenda for balance of both topics and target audience - this year for example you will be especially well-served if you are a relatively new dba - and secondly it allows for the moderation of some of the scores - where for example only a very few people have scored a particular abstract. Finally, because some presenters get consistently high scores (Jonathan Lewis being the obvious prime example)  then there is the opportunity to ensure that other, maybe lesser known, presenters also get a look-in as well.

So what did this mean this year, well we had 212 submissions for the Server Technology arena (apps dba submissions are separate). We needed to fill 64 slots. So that means we needed to eliminate 7 out of 10 submissions. The average score for  this stream was 4.5 (that's halfway between good and very good.)  and on average over 18 reviewers would have scored your submission. To get into the Top Quartile (more or less to be guaranteed a place) then you needed to score 4.93 (Very Good) on average. To restate - to stand a good chance of getting in, your abstract needed to show a group of nearly 20 Server Technology specialists that it was either very good or excellent. The bar to present at UKOUG is extremely high. Those who will be receiving congratulations communications should feel justly proud. Those who are planning to go, well you should be spoiled for choice. You can register your interest (and maybe win a laptop) here.