Tuesday, February 2, 2010

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: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 ...

3 comments:

Chen Shapira said...

I'd love to hear an explanation for "All benchmarking is institutionalized cheating". Perhaps with advice on how to do good benchmarks or what are the alternatives.

Regarding "Network problems are DB problems". I'm doing a full hour on Network problems later that day - please don't steal my show :)

Neil Gunther said...

Ask and ye shall receive!

Congrats, Chen (Gwen?), on becoming my first NoCOUG talk-sourcer. (Did I just invent a new social-networking term?) I wasn't even planning on that topic because I have a whole module on benchmarking in my GCaP classes. It even includes personal war stories about how I was involved in some heavy cheating myself. #:-O

Nonetheless, since you asked, I will now provide a potted version at NoCOUG.

GMantra 1.13: "It's never the network" http://www.perfdynamics.com/Manifesto/gcaprules.html#tth_sEc1.13 You can take the hour off. ;-)

Chen Shapira said...

Awesome! Thanks, I'm looking forward to listening to the potted version.
I'm hoping to attend your bootcamp in May, so no need to give away too many secrets.

And thanks for the hour off ;) Unfortunately, I still feel that DBAs need to know how to convince their network admin to fix the bandwidth/latency issues.

It is never the network, except when it is :)