It’s Conference Season!

My favorite mode of life is being busy doing something that I enjoy and that I know, beyond a doubt, is the Right Thing to be doing. Any hour I get to spend in that zone is a precious gift.

I’ve been in that zone nearly continuously for the past three weeks. I’ve been doing two of my favorite things: lots of consulting work (helping, earning, and learning), and lots of software development work (which helps me help, earn, and learn even faster).

I’m looking forward to the next four weeks, too, because another Right Thing that I love to do is talk with people about software performance, and three of my favorite events where I can do that are coming right up:

• RMOUG Training Days, Denver CO — I leave tomorrow. I’m looking forward to reuniting with lots of good friends. My stage time will be Wednesday, February 16th, when I’ll talk about material from my new “Mastering Performance with Extended SQL Trace” paper. 
• NoCOUG Winter Conference, Pleasanton CA — I’ll be in the east Bay Area on Thursday, February 24th presenting the keynote address where I’ll discuss whether Exadata means never having to “tune” again and then spending two hours helping people to think clearly about performance.
• Hotsos Symposium, Irving TX — I’ll present “Thinking Clearly about Performance” on Monday, March 7th. I love the agenda at this event. It’s a high quality lineup that is dedicated purely to Oracle software performance. This is one of the very few conferences where I can enjoy sitting and just watching for whole days at a time. If you are interested in Oracle system performance, do not miss this. 

Happy Valentine’s Day. I shall hope to see you soon.

New paper "Mastering Performance with Extended SQL Trace"

Happy New Year.

It’s been a busy few weeks. I finally have something tangible to show for it: “Mastering Performance with Extended SQL Trace” is the new paper I’ve written for this year’s RMOUG conference. Think of it a 15-page update to chapter 5 of Optimizing Oracle Performance.

There’s lots of new detail in there. Some highlights:

• How to enable and disable traces, even in un-cooperative applications.
• How to instrument your application so that tracing the right code path during production operation of your application becomes dead simple.
• How to make that instrumentation highly scalable (think 100,000+ tps).
• How timestamps since 10.2 allow you to know your recursive call relationships without guessing.
• How to create response time profiles for calls and groups of calls, with examples.
• Why you don’t want to be on Oracle 11g prior to 11.2.0.2.0.

I hope you’ll be able to make productive use of it.

Thinking Clearly About Performance

I’ve posted a new paper at method-r.com called “Thinking Clearly About Performance.” It’s a topic I’ll be presenting this year at:

• RMOUG (Denver) this month
• Miracle OpenWorld (Billund DK) in April
• UTOUG (Salt Lake City) in May
• Kaleidoscope (Washington DC) in June
  
• MOTS (Ann Arbor) in September

The paper is only 13 pages long, and I think you’ll be pleased with its information density. Here is the table of contents:

1. An Axiomatic Approach
2. What is Performance?
3. Response Time vs Throughput
4. Percentile Specifications
5. Problem Diagnosis
6. The Sequence Diagram
7. The Profile
8. Amdahl’s Law
9. Minimizing Risk
10. Load
11. Queueing Delay
12. The Knee
13. Relevance of the Knee
14. Capacity Planning
15. Random Arrivals
16. Coherency Delay
17. Performance Testing
18. Measuring
19. Performance is a Feature

As usual, I learned a lot writing it. I hope you’ll find it to be a useful distillation of how performance works.

Thank you, RMOUG

I want to thank everyone who came to watch me present my session called, "For Developers: Making Friends with the Oracle Database" session yesterday at RMOUG in Denver. I don't know how many of you were there, but it felt like at least a couple hundred, and I'm grateful to you for sharing your time with me. I hope you had as much fun as I did.

RMOUG was another excellent show. Lots of happy people learning and sharing what they know: you can't beat that. I think Dan Norris captured the spirit of the event very well in his blog (which is now on my blogroll).