It’s almost time for Hotsos’s 10th annual Symposium. This year’s conference will be held March 4 – 8 in Irving, Texas. The Hotsos Symposium is probably the best performance oriented Oracle conferences in the world. I am happy and humbled to be speaking at it again this year as the lineup of speakers is once [...]

As database administrators, we should have the ability to review and evaluate resources on the underlying hardware where our databases reside. Often this review is done during times of stress when there is a current performance problem. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that are useful for determining the resource usage on these platforms. [...]

In the next few days I’ll be at RMOUG 2012 training days! and I’ll be again presenting the topic so dear to my heart. Mining the AWR I’ve updated the material with a couple of new research and findings, some of them are as follows: CPU Wait (new metric in 11g Performance page) Latency issues on [...]

Lately I’ve been busy on projects and research so I’m putting more and more stuff on my wiki/braindump… and really I need to catch up on blogging. I have a longer draft post about SQLTXPLAIN.. but I haven’t finished it yet so I’ll just go with the quick post for now. SQLTXPLAIN: I’ve been using [...]

I’ll be speaking at a couple of conferences over the next month or so. Here’s the schedule: February 16th, in Denver at RMOUG Training Days 2012 - Topic: DIY Exadata February 23rd, in Redwood Shores at NoCOUG Winter Conference - Topic: DIY Exadata March 7th, in Dallas at Hotsos Symposium 2012 - Topic: Exadata Optimization – Case Studies Hope [...]

I’ve been invited to speak at Miracle Open World 2012 in Billund, Denmark!  My topic will be “Oracle Database Appliance Internals,” which I’ll try to make fun and exciting.  I’m definitely looking forward to the experience, and it’ll be great to spend time with the other speakers and attendees.  My session is currently scheduled for Thursday [...]

Oracle has announced a new patching strategy for Exadata, starting with databases running 11.2.0.3.  Oracle will be moving away from the monthly bundle patch philosophy, which was panned by many administrators as coming too often to keep up with, given the tight schedules held around most Exadata systems.  Instead, Oracle will be releasing a Quarterly [...]

Chris Date is one of the founding fathers of relational databases. Having worked with Ted Codd at IBM during the time when relational databases were being defined gives Chris a perspective that most of us just don’t have. I’ve had the good fortune to hear him speak in the past (at the Hotsos Symposium) and [...]

A recent discussion thread on the OTN Exadata forum made me want to test a feature of 11.2 RAC – voting disk redundancy.  There was one section of the Clusterware Adminsitration and Deployment Guide (http://goo.gl/eMrQM) that made me want to test it out to see how well it worked: If voting disks are stored on [...]