Tag Archives: Oracle Open World

Oracle Open World 2011

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Oracle Open World 2011 was the best ever! Everything is big at OOW. Exadata was everywhere.

Awesome presentations including some of my favorite presenters/authors, Tim Gorman, Cary Millsap, Debra Lilley, Dennis Horton and Deep Ram, Tanel Poder, Nadia Bendjedou and Cliff Godwin.

My Favorite presentation was from Cary Millsap on his presentation on “Skew”. Skew is everywhere. Did you know the average number of legs per person was 1.99? Why is it not greater than 2, because there are no three legged humans. (This is the best picture I could get of Cary, he thinks best when he’s moving).

The James Bond joke, if you don’t know what a Thermos is and someone tells you that it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold, why didn’t it work when I put my coffee and my popsicle in my thermos?  Understand your data.

Skew exists everywhere, especially in systems, charaterized by CPU, memory, disks and networks. In 11.2.0.2 there are 1118 system calls, 6 dba calls and 2 psuedo calls. The system  processes are dominated by system calls, with a few critical DBA calls.

The Upgrade SIG

From Oracle: Nadia Bendjedou, Max Arderius, Lester Gutierrez , Anne Carlson

Chairperson – Barb Matthews, Panelists included: Sandra Vucinic (moderator), Kaberi Nayak, Bill Dunham, Michael Brown, Susan Behn and Mike Swing.

 Oak Table dinner sponsered by our gracious host Mogens Norgaard of Miracle AS included Tanel Poder, a real superman. Tanel has an excellent book out on ExaData.

The dinner was held at the Franciscan Crab Restaurant and the crab was truly better than I’ve ever had.

The conference had lots of exhibitors, two of our favorite are 2e2 (with a product called ConfigSnapshot) and ePrentice.  

One of the exhibitor gifts was a sumo wrestler from Hitachi Consulting, who looks interested in the Oracle Racing Team.

 

 

 

But the best gift of all, was winning back the America’s Cup. Thanks, Uncle Larry. The first model ship I ever built was the America, after reading a book about sailing.

 

 

Best two quotes from OOW on Monday

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The first quote came from the presentation of the day, when Cary Millsap said. “When I look at the sky I see Mickey Mouse’s head”, in relation to understanding skew in idle wait events.

The second best quote came from Debra Lilley with regard to upgrading to R12.1.3 or waiting for Fusion. “Don’t Do Nothing”.

Monday at Oracle Open World

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Awesome presentations including some of my favorite presenters/authors, Tim Gorman, Cary Millsap, Debra Lilley, Dennis Horton and Deep Ram, Tanel Poder, Nadia Bendjedou and Cliff Godwin.

My Favorite presentation was from Cary Millsap on his presentation on “Skew”. Skew is everywhere. Did you know the average number of legs per person was 1.99? Why is it not greater than 2, because there are no three legged humans.

The James Bond joke, if you don’t know what a Thermos is and someone tells you that it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold, why didn’t it work when I put my coffee and my popsicle in my thermos?  Understand your data.

Skew exists everywhere, especially in systems, charaterized by CPU, memory, disks and networks. In 11.2.0.2 there are 1118 system calls, 6 dba calls and 2 psuedo calls. The system  processes are dominated by system calls, with a few critical DBA calls.

This system basically makes calls to the system and to the database.

The main idea was to illustrate the common misconception that idle wait events can be ignored. The answer is, you have to drill down to the exac cause of the wait and not look at summary data that represents median values or averages.

Cary summarized his Method R process: Identify the Important Task, Measure the Response Time, Optimize Response, Repeat until satisfied.

Check out Simpson’s paradox, a baseball statistical conundrum. Bobby Bragan the 1966 manager of the Atlanta Braves, was quoted as saying, “If you have one foot in the oven and one foot in the icebox, the percentages would say you’re fine”.

Drill down on each issue and remove the skew from each case by understanding the details of each wait.

 

 

Nadia’s clarifications of the R12 Upgrade SIG Summary

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 Corrections to my earlier summary of the R12 Upgrade SIG from Nadia. Thank you Nadia.

1)      [Mike said] Some initial promises about that capability have been nixed and the rule is Oracle will support 11.5.10.2 and 12.1, but when 12.2 comes out 11.5.10.2 is history.

a.       [Nadia edits]: The rule is that Oracle supports upgrade path from the last 2 releases of EBS, for example for Fusion V1 only 12 and 12.1 are ! the supported releases for Upgrade to Fusion. Hence 11i10 will not have an upgrade path to Fusion directly (of course the alternative for 11i10 customers is to re-implement in Fusion).

2)      [Mike said] Nadia explained that some products used in EBS, such as Forms, will be continued to be supported by the EBS group, even if they are desupported by the development group.

a.       [Nadia edits]: If a technology, that is used by EBS functionality, is desupported by the technology team at Oracle, then EBS will take over the support for that technology as long as it is needed by EBS functionality. A good example is the Oracle Workflow, which is a pre-req for EBS and is now supported by Oracle EBS development team and not by the Oracle Technology team. If one day, Oracle Forms are desupported by the technology organization and as long as Forms are required by EBS, then EBS will guarantee its support through the life of EBS.

      A few CEMLI questions came up and I thought Nadia said the CEMLI tool would become available without requiring a consulting engagement.

a.       [Nadia edits]: CEMLI is a great tool to report on the customization, but what is also interesting is to understand where those CEMLIs are being used in the customization. There is a session at Oracle OpenWorld that talks about the CEMLI Analyzer, a tool to help customer figure out the impact of CEMLIs, figure out where each customization is being used. The session is called “20920 – Oracle E-Business Suite: CEMLI Impact Analyzer”  on Thursday at at 3pm, Moscone West, Rm: 2014:

OOW Sunday Sessions I Liked

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The R12 Upgrade SIG, see below post for the details.

Craig Shallahamer, as usual, had spectacular data points, charting and graphic representations of complex ideas in his presentation “Introduction to Oracle Buffer Cache Internals”. This was not an introduction, but a detailed thesis on the proper configuration and troubleshooting of the Buffer Cache. Bravo.

Kamran Agayev gave a very good overview of “11g RMAN New Features”. I was very impressed with his research, demos and presentation skills (video in his powerpoints!).

Tim Gorman, the godfather of Data Warehousing, presented “Partitioning – Scaling to Infinity and Beyond”. Excellent, I seen this presentation a dozen times and still learn something new each time.