Upcoming Speaking Engagements

In the next months I’ll be speaking at several conferences and user group meetings. I’m looking forward to meet some of you at one of these events.

The abstracts of the presentations are the following (in Switzerland and Germany I’ll give the presentation in German; hence the last abstract is in German. The short summary is that I’ll present the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 feature called “Edition-Based Redefinition”):

• Interpreting Execution Plans: An execution plan describes the operations carried out by the SQL engine to execute an SQL statement. Every time you have to analyze a performance problem related to an SQL statement or simply question the decisions taken by the query optimizer, you must know the execution plan. Whenever you deal with an execution plan, you carry out three basic actions: you obtain it, you interpret it, and you judge its efficiency. The aim of this session is to describe in detail how you should perform the second of these three actions—in other words, how to read execution plans.
• Parallel Processing: When you submit a SQL statement to a database engine, by default it is executed serially by a single server process. Therefore, even if the server running the database engine has several CPUs, your SQL statement runs on a single CPU. This means that the amount of resources used for the execution of a SQL statement is restricted by the amount of processing a single CPU can do. The purpose of parallel processing is to distribute the execution of a single SQL statement over several CPUs.
  This session describes not only how parallel processing works, but also when to use it. In other words, how it can be used to improve performance. In addition, it also describes how to configure the database engine to efficiently support it.
• Edition-Based Redefinition: Das Upgraden von kritischen Applikationen kann sehr schwierig sein. Eines der Hauptprobleme besteht darin, dass aus Verfügbarkeitsgründen regelmässige und lange Downtimes nicht eingeplant werden können. Deshalb ist es wünschenswert online Verfahren für solche Upgrades zu implementieren. Dies bedingt nicht nur eine Applikation die dafür vorgesehen ist, sondern auch dass jede benutzte Software, wie z.B. der Datenbank Server, online Upgrades zulässt. Oracle hat dieses Problem seit Jahren erkannt. Leider wurde dies bis und mit Database 11g Release 1 nicht umgesetzt. Ab Oracle Database 11g Release 2 hat sich diese Situation sehr stark geändert. Mit „Edition-Based Redefinition“ bietet Oracle eine echte Unterstützung um online Upgrades zu implementieren. In diesem Vortrag wird diese neue Funktionalität im Detail präsentiert.