Jonathan Lewis, will be giving our Keynote Presentation,
Optimizing through Understanding—Investigating One SQL Statement.
Jonathan Lewis is one of the world's foremost Oracle experts and Oracle Magazine's 2006 "Oracle Author of the Year." He is a member of the prestigious Oak Table Network, a network for Oracle Scientists. Jonathan has been an independent design and troubleshooting consultant for more than 12 years. He runs JL Computer Consultancy www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk and specializes in knowing how the database engine works. If you need to know which features of Oracle may be useful for your specific application, Jonathan will be able to tell you because he spends a lot of time investigating how well new features work and how easy it is to break them. If you need to make your system run faster, he can tell you what can be done, and what is most likely to be a cost-effective approach. Jonathan has long been a top presenter at IOUG, Oracle OpenWorld, UK Oracle User Group, and at User Groups everywhere. He is the author of Practical Oracle 8i - Building Efficient Databases and the "Dreadful Design" chapter of Oracle Insights - Tales of the Oak Table and the upcoming "Cost Based Oracle - Volume 1".
Jonathan has written many fine articles on numerous aspects of Oracle Performance Tuning for the UK user group magazine, BMC's online journal DBAzine and other publications.

In addition, Jonathan will be conducting a pre-conference workshop, Troubleshooting or Tuning, on Monday, October 26. The workshop will include the following discussions:

Troubleshooting or Tuning What's the difference? What are the strategies. Why tuning is hard, trouble-shooting is easy and design is important. Key targets for producing a well-tuned system on day one. How to approach design, and plan for trouble-shooting, and how to be on the alert for activities where the resource utilization is unreasonably high.

Looking for Problems If you know the sorts of problems your design is going to face, then you There are three major classes of problem, but just one source of (Oracle) information. It’s important to recognize what class of problem you’re attacking and pick the best way of using the available information to identify the source of your problem. We outline examples of the three classes and the corresponding approaches, and end with a detailed example of problem-solving.

Tactical Fixes Methods, workarounds, dirty tricks and parameters for dealing with classic performance problems when the system is in production. Some of the examples we cover are specific to particular production issues, some are generic quick fixes that can be applied across the board. All fixes need careful examination of costs, risk, and benefits. In this session we consider examples of strategies that are most likely to be worthwhile.

V$, X$ and Statspack/AWR It's a good idea to be familiar with just a few of the dynamic performance views - and there are a couple of items in the still hidden away in the X$ objects that can add be useful in special cases. This session will present some ideas on how to take advantage of the dynamic performance objects directly, and then move on to some of the more useful information they supply. In particular, we review the Statspack and AWR interfaces to the dynamic performance views - closing with a case study of using Statspack to solve a performance problem.

2009 Conference Schedule (Subject to Change)

Monday, October 26
Workshop by Jonathan Lewis, Troubleshooting or Tuning, Time TBD

Tuesday, October 27