Hotsos 2007 Sizzled!

Just returned from Dallas where I was an invited speaker at the Hotsos 2007 Symposium on ORACLE performance. This symposium was a class operation: great hotel, great people, great food, great presentations, etc. and, as a newbie, I was treated very well. It seems that Cary Milsap (the energy behind the symposium) had already greased the runway for me, so I found myself to be a known quantity to many of the attendees, even though I had never met them before. This was way cool (Thanks, Cary).

Although ostensibly a group of very enthusiastic ORACLE performance people (about 450 attendees), they are not bigots, so they are interested in all aspects of performance. Moreover, Oracle performance gets critiqued. Capacity planning is one aspect that is new for many of them and I was a member of a panel session on that topic. During the 24 hours I was there, I attended a very interesting session on the measured limitations of RAC 10g scalability for parallel loads (ETL) and queries against a large-scale data warehouse (DWH), and a talk on how data skew can impact the kind of performance conclusions you tend to draw. But perhaps the most interesting things that I learnt came out of several spontaneous discussions I had with various folks, including some conversations that went into the wee hours of Monday morning. My only regret was that I couldn't stay longer. I definitely plan to attend Hotsos 2008.