Oak Table Comes to Michigan!

The first Michigan Oak Table Symposium (MOTS) is happening this September! On the 16th and 17th.

Go here NOW to see more info and sign up, only 300 attendees will be allowed -> http://michigan.oaktable.net

There is a great set of speaker for this event and you wouldn't want to miss this!!

A partial list of speakers includes: Jonathan Lewis, Cary Millsap, Christian Antognini, Riyaj Shamsudeen, Randolf Geist, Charles Hooper, and many more.

(Find the Oak Tree in the above picture for a prize! Hint: There isn't one....)

Ho-ho-ho!

Check it out! All of us at Hotsos have some seasons greetings for you at the Hotsos web site!

Happy holidays everyone!

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The 2010 Hotsos Symposium

Hey everyone the Hotsos Sym is coming soon! March 7^th to the 11^th of 2010. There is a great group off speakers, including me! (Wow, how’d I slip in again, someone must not have been watching carefully! Hehehe.. ) Make sure you are there and sign up now.

Click here for a link to the official page.

Make sure to check out the videos on the page.

Tom Kyte is the Keynote and is sure to deliver an awesome presentation he will also do two more presentations during the Symposium. Tanel Põder as the trainer for the optional training day on the 11^th. Make sure to sign up for the training day when you sign up. Seating is limited for the training day, don’t miss it. Tanel is a fantastic presenter and trainer. His presentations are standing room only around the world. Don't miss this opportunity.

I hear the party night is schedule to be Disco!

Where are my white bell-bottom slacks, vest, big collar shirt and jacket.... Staying-alive-ah-ah-ah!

I was recently in Houston TX teaching for two weeks and had the excellent opportunity to eat at a TEXAS ROADHOUSE while I was there. Yes it is a chain and sort of more know for stakes rather then ribs, but these were darn good ribs. I'm adding them to my list of restaurants worth going to if I find one in a town I'm in. And heck with free peanuts that you toss the shells on the floor, yeehaw! Count me in! :-)

Yes, this is the performance problem.

Recently in a class of mine we were all reviewing a trace file (10046) of a transaction that ran on the client’s system. There was one SQL statement that consumed about 70% of the total time for the run. The statement was rather simple one table and one predicate. The predicate was a concatenation of several columns (each had an index) with an equality operator to a concatenation of a couple of binds.

The predicate looked something like this (it was longer and slightly more complicated, then this but this captures the flavor):

where COL1 || '-' || COL2 = :B1 || '-' || :B2

Pretty clearly the Optimizer can’t use the indexes on the columns because they are concatenated together in the predicate. The STAT lines weren’t in the trace data so we couldn’t see for sure but it was likely doing a full table scan which was driving about 60,000 LIOs for the statement. After some discussion several options were bantered about on how to fix the SQL, with a new index and rewriting the predicate being the top two.

As we were finishing up the discussion, the person who brought in the trace said “But this statement isn’t the performance problem.”

To which I replied “Oh yes it is.”

This is something that I’ve experienced before. Folks will think another SQL statement is the problem before they start and when it isn’t they still focus on the statement they think is the problem. We all do it. We have a preconceived idea of what the problem is and when faced with something else, we have a hard time getting over our preconceived idea.

This is the root of why having some one with little knowledge of the system can seem to have such great insight. Really it’s just that they have no preconceived idea of what is wrong. They can then follow the clues without prejudice and see what everyone else may have missed.

Cardinal Thomas Wosley (1471-1530) was an advisor to King Henry the VIII. He gave the King the advice of "Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out." Several 100 years later this advice still rings true.

Temperatures

Living in the Great State of Michigan in the USA gives me the opportunity to experience weather in all its ways. This is my thermometer on my back porch.

Ribs In New Jersey

I'm here in New Jersey the Garden state of the USA. Went out for some good ribs at Houston's (181 Riverside Sq Mall Hackensack, NJ). Quite good. Very nice atmosphere and friendly staff. Although I do prefer a dry rub on the ribs the sauce they used was excellent. I also really liked the shoe string fries, they were nice and crunchy. The coleslaw was different from my norm and quite tasty as well. Great meal!