Let Knowledge Spring Forth at Nocoug
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RTH NO ERN C A L I F Official Publication of the Northern California Oracle Users Group O R N I ✸ A O R A C L E U S E JOURNAL R S G R O U P Vol. 23, No. 2 · MAY 2009 $15 Let Knowledge Spring Forth at NoCOUG Fresh Perspectives ASM Test SQL Corner An interview with Karen Environment Graphical query execution plans. Morton. An excerpt from a new book. See page 16. See page 4. See page 9. Much more inside . Let Knowledge Spring 2009 NoCOUG BOARD President Forth at NoCOUG Hanan Hit, DBA InfoPower [email protected] ou don’t have to travel to distant lands to hear the best Oracle speakers divulge their Oracle secrets—you can do that right here in the Bay Area. Vice President At the spring conference on May 21 at CarrAmerica Conference Center Jen Hong, Stanford University in Pleasanton, you can hear two members of the famous OakTable net- [email protected] Ywork: Cary Millsap and Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha. Both are performance tuning Secretary/Treasurer experts; Cary is the inventor of Method R and Gaja coined the term “Compulsive Naren Nagtode, Franklin Templeton Tuning Disorder.” [email protected] In tough economic times such as these, it’s more important than ever to keep your knowledge and skills current and relevant. And where better to widen your Director of Membership Joel Rosingana, Independent Consultant horizons than at NoCOUG? Every year NoCOUG brings you four great educational [email protected] conferences and four great issues of the NoCOUG Journal. Where in the world can you find such an outstanding educational value for only $90 per year? Journal Editor I hope you agree with me and that you will join me at the spring conference on Iggy Fernandez, Database Specialists May 21. s [email protected] —Iggy Fernandez, NoCOUG Journal Editor Webmaster Eric Hutchinson, Independent Consultant [email protected] Vendor Coordinator Table of Contents Lisa Loper, Independent Consultant President’s Message .......................................... 3 ADVERTISERS Director of Conference Programming Randy Samberg Interview .............................................................. 4 Roundstone Systems ........................................ 11 Access Systems Americas, Inc. [email protected] Special Feature .....................................................9 Princeton Softech ............................................. 11 Training Day Coordinator Precise Software Solutions ............................. 13 Ask the Oracles I ................................................ 12 Chen Shapira, HP [email protected] BEZ Systems ...................................................... 21 Compliance Corner ............................................ 14 IOUG Representative/Track Leader Database Specialists, Inc. ............................... 21 Claudia Zeiler, ECWise Inc. SQL Corner ......................................................... 16 DBA InfoPower .................................................22 [email protected] Book Review .......................................................20 IT Convergence .................................................25 Vendor Coordinator Noelle Stimely Teamwork at NoCOUG ......................................22 Quest Software .................................................25 [email protected] Sponsorship Appreciation.................................23 Embarcadero Technologies .............................25 NoCOUG Staff Nora Rosingana Session Descriptions ..........................................24 Network Appliance ...........................................25 Book Reviewer Conference Schedule.........................................28 Confio Software ................................................27 Raghav Vinjamuri Publication Notices and Submission Format ADVERTISING RATES The NoCOUG Journal is published four times a year by the Northern California Oracle The NoCOUG Journal is published quarterly. Users Group (NoCOUG) approximately two weeks prior to the quarterly educational conferences. Size Per Issue Per Year Please send your questions, feedback, and submissions to the NoCOUG Journal editor Quarter Page $125 $400 at [email protected]. Half Page $250 $800 The submission deadline for the upcoming August 2009 issue is May 31, 2009. Article Full Page $500 $1,600 submissions should be made in Microsoft Word format via email. Inside Cover $750 $2,400 Copyright © 2009 by the Northern California Oracle Users Group except where other- wise indicated. Personnel recruitment ads are not accepted. NoCOUG does not warrant the NoCOUG Journal to be error-free. [email protected] 2 May 2009 PRESIDE nt ’ S MESSAGE In the Middle of Every Difficulty Lies Opportunity by Hanan Hit Hanan Hit he economic recession creates greater opportuni- and friends about NoCOUG. You can do a great favor for ties for Oracle professionals as companies strive to other Oracle professionals by introducing them to our users improve their operational processes and raise their group. Enlarging the NoCOUG membership network bene- efficiencies by combining newer technology with fits all of us. Tgreater staff expertise. Stephen Elliot, IT senior analyst with I hope to see you at NoCOUG’s spring conference at IDC, showed that on average 80% of IT system outages are CarrAmerica Conference Center in Pleasanton on May 21. caused by operator and application errors. With the tolerance Let’s thank Randy Samberg, NoCOUG’s director of confer- of such errors diminishing, there is a growing demand for ence programming, for giving us the opportunity to have those who can implement the most recent Oracle technolo- two members of the Oak Table attend our conference: Cary gies to reduce operational cost and improve business appli- Millsap of Method R, and Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha of cation availability, contributing directly to an organization’s DBPerfMan. Cary will deliver the opening keynote address. revenue. Gaja’s claim is that “the SAN is guilty . until proven other- At times like these, NoCOUG pledges to its members wise.” We’ll have a dozen technical sessions for you to choose that we will continue to provide the best value for career from, book raffles, networking opportunities, and more. You development in Northern California. We are an independent will find a lot of technical details, along with best practices volunteer organization dedicated to the education and repre- and hard to come by facts from the trenches. sentation of the users of Oracle Corporation’s database and Albert Einstein said, “In the middle of every difficulty lies tools. NoCOUG has been around for over 15 years. opportunity.” Let NoCOUG help you turn the current eco- If you are not yet a NoCOUG member, I encourage you to nomic difficulties into opportunities. We are looking forward join online today at www.nocoug.org. I also encourage ev- to seeing you at the spring conference at CarrAmerica Con- eryone to spread the word: Tell your officemates, colleagues, ference Center in Pleasanton on May 21. s (PHOTO COURTESY OF CHEN SHAPIRA) Keynote speaker Tom Kyte (center) and NoCOUG members hamming it up for the camera at the winter conference. Were you there? NoCOUG director of conference programming Randy Samberg is as pleased as punch. The NoCOUG Journal 3 INTERVIEW Fresh Perspectives from Karen Morton Karen Morton For over 20 years, Karen has worked in information technol- anymore, don’t seem to need one, and can’t afford to pay ogy, starting out as a mainframe programmer and then growing for one. The application was written in-house. and changing with the times to do development, DBA, and data Well, I think you answered the question for me by saying architect work. She has been using Oracle since the early 1990s they don’t have a support contract, don’t seem to need one and began teaching others how to use Oracle over a decade ago. and can’t afford one even if they did. In this case, it sounds She has authored several Oracle training course books, includ- like a case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” They have stable ing leading the development of the Hotsos and Method R SQL performance using what they’ve got and no apparent need for Optimization curriculum. Karen is an Oracle Ace and a mem- any features 11g might provide. Until they can justify a need, ber of the Oak Table Network. She blogs at karenmorton. then they’re doing the best they can for their business by stay- blogspot.com. ing with 9i. The risks of upgrading, particularly the possibil- Why Oracle? Enterprise Edition with Par- ity of execution plan instability that might cause performance titioning now costs $59,000 per CPU. The issues, isn’t worth it when they are happy and rock solid where annual support fee is 22% of the purchase they are. price. MySQL has partitioning and the price We spend a lot of time tuning databases. is right: it’s free. Why does it have to be that way? Is Oracle Oracle has led the industry for the past two decades and I difficult to tune? Are we building the data- don’t see that changing. My world revolves around Oracle, bases or applications wrong? so I can’t really speak to the differences with MySQL as far as The whole idea that tuning is difficult is functionality, reliability, scalability, and performance. Yes, a very pervasive belief. Many people think it is more magic Oracle is expensive. Is it worth the cost to your business? than science and believe if you don’t know how to tweak Only your business can decide that. I hear the old adage “you some 200-plus instance parameters in just the right way, get what you pay for” floating