NorCal ORACLE User Group Meeting

The 2010 Winter noCOUG Conference will be held at the CarrAmerica Conference Center in Pleasanton, California, on Thursday, February 11, 2010. Attendance is $50 for non-members. If you're planning to attend, then you will need to RSVP online.

I will be presenting both:

• a Keynote: "Why Are There No Giants?" (9:30 - 10:30) and
  
• a Technical Session: “Performance Analysis for Those Who Can't Wait” (beginner's level, 11:00 - Noon)
  

Some topics that I'm toying with for my Technical Session, include :

• Functionality first.
  There's no point trying to tune something that is pathologically broken.
  
• Business performance always trumps system performance.
  Meeting the biz app SLA could mean never running CPUs higher than 10% utilization.
  In that case, the response time metric is more appropriate than the utilization or throughput metric.
  
• It's never the network!
  SQL traffic over the network is a DB tunable, not a network tunable.
  
• Throw more iron at it!
  If the app is single-threaded (even if that wasn't the plan), a boat-load of cheap PCs won't improve performance.
  
• Bandwidth and latency are related. Nonlinearly!
  

But I'm really looking to include performance-related questions from an Oracle DBA's perspective. A crowd-sourced talk! So, feel free to submit your questions here, or Tweet me, for possible incorporation. Update Talk-sourcer questions:

• "When is performance needed and what do you want to do with it?" (Tam Mordhorst)
  
• "Discuss how competitive benchmarking is institutionalized cheating." (Chen Shapira)
  
• Your question here ...