Indexing, IT Opinion, Streams

Indexing

Two more great performance related postings from Richard Foote, the indexing guru:

The Cardinality of leading columns


and

Index Create and Rebuild Locking Improvements in 11g

IT Opinion: Data Modeling

Andrew Clarke over at the Radio Free Tooting blog opines at some length about data modeling, is it a dying art (if not a dead one)? I have to admit that I did a lot more data modeling in the course of my career taking courses about data modeling than I did in the actual work. Perhaps it is partly a result of the increasing specialization of our field. Many DBAs do nothing but maintain systems that have been handed to them, all design work completed (albeit sometimes with tragicomic results). The number of instances is also a sobering fact of life. In the past it would be unusual to find a DBA responsible for more than five instances. Now a mere five instances managed would be rare indeed in a large enterprise environment. With the availability of advanced monitoring and control system there are many DBA managing dozens of instances without breaking a sweat (ok, ok, without breaking a sweat often).

In the realm of speculation I would add that I see a future where DBA work is translated more and more into intelligent agents (no, not those, REALLY intelligent agents). Small, artificial intelligence program will be able to take a lot of the drudgery out of the tasks involved, calling in humans over a grid of responsibilities distributed through Workflow as needed. When the program detects that it is in a fuzzy area it will call in a human to make a sensible decision.

This kind of approach is not far in the future. There are already interesting experiments using the so-called mechanical Turk approach. This divides tasks into numerous mini-tasks that are shared among a group of volunteer or low-paid humans over the Net. They accomplish tasks, such as sophisticated pattern recognition, where the technology still lags behind our brain's abilities, and a computer handles reassembling the tiny tasks into a consistent result.

Streams

There's an outstanding article for those using or studying Oracle Streams at Chen Shapira's I'm Just a Simple DBA blog here. Streams sometimes seems a rather arcane subject, but can be an absolutely revolutionary feature of the Oracle RDBMS when used wisely.

Hyperion, JD Edwards, Performance

Hyperion

Learning about Hyperion? This Essbase discussion group is a good place to explore.

JD Edwards

Major JD Edwards additions to Oracle Accelerate program, as described at the JD Edwards Advisor blog.

Performance

Ever want to impress your friends at a party? Just read this article from the Oracle Optimizer Team and you'll be able to read SQL execution plans and make clever comments like: 'Oh, to taste all the appetizers in the buffet you're going to have to do a full table scan. You'd be better off taking one of each and indexing'. Don't be concerned if people move to the other side of the room. It's a sign of respect.

Open Source, Performance, NFS

Open Source

Open Source, while not necessarily free (a lot of programs offer paid support, for instance), is definitely a viable alternative for many businesses and individuals. The most glaring example for me is Photoshop, an application often victimized by pirating because it is just plain expensive. I use The Gimp for what little graphic editing I do. I make a tiny scrape in the top surface of the layer upon layer of Gimp features. This link has a list of 50 open source alternatives to commercial software and OS.

Performance

H.Tonguç YILMAZ has a brief but very content-rich second installment of his series on the Performance Tuning Protocol.


New Blog from Cary Millsap

Cary Millsap, one of the pillars of Oracle performance optimization, now has a blog.

NFS

Kevin Closson gets positively passionate about the subject of Oracle and NFS support, dropping dozens of useful links along the way for folks interested in Oracle, RAC, NFS, etc. in this article.

Conferences

For various reasons, nearly everyone enjoys conferences. Here are a few upcoming conferences of interest:

APPSPERF 2008

Ahmed Alomari, long time guru on Apps performance within Oracle, has founded his own company and is having a conference called APPSPERF, on Oracle Applications performance tuning and best practices. It's coming up in Denver in April. Details here.

Hyperion

There is now a Hyperion track at ODTUG Kaleidoscopre 2008.
as well as the Collaborate 08 conference.

YAW2.0A, 11g, RSS for Oracle Podcasts

YAW2.oA (Yet Another Web 2.0 Application)

Get all settled in Oracle Mix? Good! Now it's time to join Oracle Community, another place to network about Oracle. I was going to title this entry Yet Another Web Networking 2.0 Application, but I don't think anyone wants to follow a link labelled YAWN 2.0A.

RSS

Speaking of Web 2.0, this page has an RSS feed available for Oracle podcasts.

11g

Many of our customers are testing 11g. You can find a list of articles on 11g here, and several of them have been updated recently, such as the one on SecureFiles.

And at the Systems Engineering and RDBMS blog we have a nice succinct article on Encrypted Tablespaces in 11g.

Also in the widening realm of 11 is this article at the Oracle Developer.net Blog on pl/sql function result cache in 11g.

New IM and SQLDev, JRE, Performance, NUMA, Business

Identity Manager and SQL Developer new releases

There's a new version of Identity Manager out there. Get 'acquainted' here.

and a new version of SQL Developer on OTN here.

Eddie Awad has some nice screen shots and new features descriptions here.

JRE

More excellent postings on Steven Chan's blog. Today it's Diagnosing Sun Java Plug-in Issues with Oracle Apps on working with the sometimes tricky Java Runtime Engine.

Performance

Vivek Sharma encounters a common practise, frequent index rebuilds designed to prevent trouble which, instead, cause trouble in his Database / SQL Experiences blog. The short message, oft repeated by Oak Table members and other guruistic types, is don't rebuild indexes unless you have to. Simple DBA has an article on the very same subject.

And the long silent Ardent Peformance Computing blog has snapped back to life with a nice concise article on Oracle I/O and Operating System Caching.

The start of an excellent series by Tanel Poder on 'Oracle Hidden Costs'. A really good under the hood article that digs in to the network traffic and the trace files.

Richard Foote (Dr. Index) shares some wisdom on the oft-misunderstood bitmap index and a good article on coalescing indexes in 10g.

NUMA

Kevin Closson has an article on NUMA, with a reference to an even greater depth article (I'm talking ocean-depth) material on CSI (common system interface, not the TV show).

Business

This post at the Zen Habits blog is a nice list of ways to organize a busy, relentless day to be more forgiving and livable. The emphasis seems to be on getting a good start by getting up early and doing relaxing things, or staying up late to work when things are quiet. I can't help but feel that at some point in the IT schedule those two are going to meet, with a night spent working in the quiet stillness of your office melding smoothly into a morning routine of hot baths and quiet cups of coffee..followed by nervous collapse. But hey, I'm an optimist.

IT Opinion: Cloud Computing

IT Opinion: Clouds on the Horizon

There is a new buzz word, cloud computing, and it's very similar in concept to our very own buzz word - grid computing. The concepts are closely related and highly timely. As the world grows and its resources remain more or less static, waste becomes ever more harmful. Servers are designed to work reliably, day in and day out, year by year. But most companies use them heavily in the day, run a few batch jobs and a backup in the PM, and leave a large amount of the resource unused. Wasted power, wasted computing capacity....waste.

By using grid computing an enterprise can use its Asian server farms when it is night in the East and vice versa for the West. This concept is now moving to the next level, cloud computing, in which a large group of enterprises can share the same 'cloud' of computing resources.

IBM just announced opening a cloud computing center in China. I predict that this type of enterprise is going to grow massively in China and India. Cloud computing centers require only reliable communications and good infrasctructure to operate, and both countries are building a formidable computing infrastructure.