Last week, I attended Latvian Oracle User Group conference Harmony 2012, held in Riga, Latvia on June 1. The event featured several “stars” of the Oracle world, including Tom Kyte, Tanel Poder, Graham Wood, Daniel Morgan and others. Events like this are a great opportunity to catch up with recent trends in Oracle development and tuning, learn new tricks of the trade, hear the best tuning specialist tell how they tackled their most difficult performance cases, and more!
The opening presentation was T. Kyte’s “Five Things You Probably Don’t Know About SQL”, where he talked about SQLNet compression, nulls and cardinalities, deterministic functions, scalar subqueries and internal Oracle monitoring of table usage. Tom is a great speaker and it was a pleasure watching him giving his speech. Another great talk was given by Tanel Poder, who presented a most interesting account of step-by-step resolution of an extremely difficult database performance issue using high-resolution profiling tools.
Graham Wood of Oracle presented two related talks, about Active Session History (ASH) and DB-time based tuning (which uses ASH data to identify primary resource consumers in the database). This presentation was both interesting and highly informative (and also a rare opportunity to receive knowledge about Oracle from first hands — who can better tell us about ASH than the Oracle architect working on it?!).
I’d like to thank both the organizers and speakers for this wonderful event!
Oracle Diagnostician 