Hotsos 2008: Day 3

Only two things happened today; I gave my presentation on "Better Performance Management through Better Visualization Tools" and I met with Bob Sneed because he also asked my to review his presentation.

My talk was well attended, in spite of the fact that I was originally a little defensive about giving it. I was worried that attendees might think it was too much "blue sky" but by the time I was on stage, it was clear to me that several earlier talks already provided a good segue for my own talk. Moreover, Cary had said in his opening remarks on Monday, that part of the purpose of the symposium was to "inspire someone!" So, I figured if I could just connect with one person in the audience, I was home. It turned out that, at least four people came up to me afterwards and told me about ideas they had for applying Barry3 or Barry4 to Oracle performance data. In particular, Tanel Poder suggested to me that the Oracle Wait Interface (ASCII data representation) can be partitioned to meet the Barry sum-rule requirement: whichever metrics you choose, they must add up to 100% (just like CPU user, sys, and idle times). Barry could potentially be easily incorporated into his PerfSheet tool, so I'll let him do it. :-)

Around 5:30 pm Bob Sneed and I sat down to review his presentation. This time Bob supplied the wine. Afterwards, we and some others toddled off to Texas de Brazil (a Churrascaria) for dinner. Nobody knew where the restaurant was exactly. To demonstrate that we are all performance and capacity experts to the core, we used 3 cars, 2 of which took off before Bob and I could follow them in his rental car. They went to the wrong restaurant in downtown Dallas because they were following each other while Bob and I went nowhere. We were still waiting in the hotel driveway for the other 2 cars without realizing they had already left without us. Amazingly, these errors cancelled one another out and we all ended up at the correct restaurant at exactly the same time. The performance gods were amused too, it seems; it didn't snow that night.