Report on My Third AUSOUG Conference! (days 0 & 1)

I returned from AUSOUG conference in Perth (Australia) just last week. This blog is my report from the conference for the days 0 and 1. I have spent several days helping my family recover from sickness and had a short brake before getting back to normal and up to speed with day to day duties. Now I am ready do this report for you.

My flight from Sydney to Perth went well and I managed to write an application for a new internal position at Pythian plus went through my presentations’ slide-desks several times (I was about to present 2 presentations). The interesting thing about the flight from Sydney to Perth is the fact that it is by 1 hour longer than other way around (5 against 4 hours). I assume it is because of the earth wonder twisting :)

The conference traditionally is held in the Burswood Entertainment Center. Thanks to Pythian’s fantastic office assistance (mother of all employees) Jennifer my accommodations were booked just next door to the center.

Just a few hours after arrival, together with bunch of Oracle ACEs and other technical geeks I took part in a  friendly dinner organized by ADF and other JDev stuff magician Chris Muir at “Cocos Restaurant”. You would be surprised how friendly and down to earth those people are. Just mentioning the fact that each of participants gladly shared a dish he/she ordered with others enjoying a festival of different flavors of food, the atmosphere and the company. BTW: The food was excellent and I would suggest you to visit this restaurant  if you will be in Perth by any chance.

Next morning the conference program began! And my brand new “10 problems with your RMAN scripts” presentation was part of it.

The day started with global messages during Key Notes. Yes I know. Most of us skipping those to have an additional hour of sleep. This time I was up 6am because of 3 hours time difference between Perth and Sydney. Plus I was curious on what messages the big ANZ bosses were going to send out and my expectations was fulfilled. Doug Hughes from Oracle ANZ Applications division confirmed 2 my thoughts in relation to Apps area:

1. FusionApps implementation are under careful watch in ANZ region. Oracle is not rushing implementing the new super product (co-existence, SaaS, etc). We are having a slow adoption year in front of us.
2. EBS is more than alive! There are 900 developers working on EBS development only. I know that 12.2 release isn’t far way and will bring a lot of new conceptual solution (e.g. online patching using 2 APPL_TOP-s and Edition Based Redefinition).

If you are like me an EBS technical person it looks like there is no reasons to jump into FusionApps ocean immediately. It looks like we will get there slowly.

Next stop for my was “The Studio” – room where I was about to present in a few hours. As I had a bit of challenge at Oracle OpenWorld with a room and equipment (see my previous blog posts) I did all possible to familiarize myself with the environment. I will get back to the room soon. It was time to listen others now. On the way to the next presentation I met SAGE lovely piggies :)

The first technical presentation I attended at this conference was “DB Time-based Oracle Performance
Tuning: Theory and Practice” from Graham Wood. First, I would like to say huge thanks to Oracle Technology Network for giving us an opportunity to listen to such experienced Oracle professionals as Graham. Did you know that Graham Wood started working with 2.0 version of Oracle? It was interesting to listen Graham talking about modern time based performance diagnostic approach (V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY/DBA_HIST_ACTIVE_SESS_HISTORY).

As a DBA often involved in the in the mysterious performance and other issues troubleshooting I think that it would be cool if Oracle in next version of Automatic Workload Repository include/store data from V$SESSTAT and V$SESSION_EVENT at least for those sessions that are reported/filtered (potentially are problematic) in DBA_HIST_ACTIVE_SESS_HISTORY view. This would give us an additional view on the events in the past related tot the problematic sessions. It looks like this option isn’t in Oracle’s pipeline. At least isn’t for next version.

After a transit time I joined Tim Hall from Oracle Base for his “The powerhouse PL/SQL upgrade option: Edition-Based Redefinition” presentation. I like the way Tim presented the topic. It was a nice mixture of slides and life demonstrations. Scripts are prepared in the way to push an enter button and keep talking about the topic. Few take my take aways from the presentation are as following:

• Edition-Based Redefinition doesn’t work with tables directly (doesn’t support/apply on tables). That means any team who would like to use several versions of an application running at the same time should introduce an intermediate views layer (special Edition-Based views that ensures that SQL execution plans are 100% the same as for SQL that it based on would be executed against underling table). I have heard that Oracle e-Business Suite 12.2 going to use Edition-Based Redefinition for applying patches online. Having in mind the additional view layer it may be a lot of work to be done to make EBS working with EBR. Not sure how “easy” it is going to be to troubleshoot/maintain EBS modules in such configuration (just if you don’t know how complex the EBS db is R12.1.2 version has ~427 830 objects ; 30 348 table; 45 218 packages and package bodies)
• If I got it right there is just one version chain per database and no multiple child allowed as for now (one to one version chain). There are indications though that in the next database version ( 12c ;) the limitation will be removed.
• Tim is a good presenter to listen to :)

Well at this stage it was time to start worrying. The next slot after lunch and a key note was my “10 problems with your RMAN backup script” presentation. The challenge I introduced for this presentation is as following:

The author will give away a prize to any Oracle DBA who has a script without any issues mentioned in the presentation.

Thanks to the Burswood conference center stuff I got my price ready to be given away (see the image bellow) and spent an hours before the presentation practicing in the room (during the key note there wasn’t any presentation here) and getting myself ready.

I had ~40-50 people in the room and guess what? :) The prize stayed with me after the presentation. It looks like many participants found at least one point that made him/her think about possible Backup & Recovery issues. I think this is an indication that I have completed my mission. It was especially nice was to receive the following feedback after the presentation.

“Thank you for a great presentation at our Perth conference. Definitely the best and most informative of the first day.”

I am planning to write some blog posts on the suggestions I am making during this presentation. Stay tuned!

The last two slots of the Day 1 I attended presentations given by people I knew for some time from a virtual world (social media) – Kai Yu and Francisco Munoz Alvarez.

Kai was talking about “Oracle 11g R2 Clusterware” and if you are not aware then in Oracle RAC 11G R2 release Clusterware is the area that got the biggest amount of changes compared with 11G R1 release! I call it a “silence” revolution :) So many significant changes have been introduced the Oracle cluster and so small information (buzz) available about it. Kai’s presentation specifically talking about the “revolutionary” things in details. One of the things that caught my attention was “Oracle Local Registry” file. As Kai explained this is a small local copy of Cluster Repository located under $GI_HOME/cdata directory that allows starting Cluster processes necessary for ASM component. This way Oracle solves chicken and egg problem when ASM makes voting disks and cluster repository available for Cluster processes and ASM can’t startup without Cluster processes running.

Francisco is a legendary person in User Groups space. He is President at NZOUZ and LAOUC hi is Oracle ACE Director and as many ACEs he invest a lot of his time sharing his experience. This time Francisco was sharing his view on Oracle Security area. His presentation was full of hints for Oracle DBA on how to make Oracle database more secure. One of the concepts that he presented was the idea where your Application shouldn’tconnect to the schema owning data objects (tables). It should be getting access to the tables via separate user or in ideal case though the third schema that would own views and interfaces that would provide access to tables. It might be an overkill but if you think about security it make sense to have an application connecting via APPS_CONN schema, calling PL/SQL and other code objects ( e.g. VIEWEs) from APPS_REP schema and the code objects would access data in the APPS_DATA schema.

The active Conference Day 1 have finished with Welcome Reception. Where we did a bit of networking with beer in hands and friendly technology related discussions.

Give me a few days and I will get back to you with the second par of my report. Day 2 was full of interesting events including the Expert panel we commonly organized with  Scott Wesley and Vinod Patel from AUSOUG WA.

To be continued …