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Join Oracle at your local IOUG event this Feb, there are many of them. Also, we’ll be participating in Data Warehousing, Database Security and Big Data events, read on to find out more.

Feb 12-17, 2012 – Las Vegas, NV

TDWI World Conference Series

Join Oracle and learn how Oracle’s solution for Data Integration and Big Data continues to set the standard for information integration architectures.

Bridging the Big Data Divide with Oracle Data Integration

Wednesday, February 15, 2012 7p.m

Denis Gray, Principal Product Manager, Data Integration

 Nick Wagner, Distinguished Product Manager, Data Integration

http://events.tdwi.org/events/las-vegas-world-conference-2012/home.aspx

Feb 25-26, 2012 - San Francisco, CA

ISSA CISO Executive Forum

 Join Mary Ann Davidson, Chief Security Officer at Oracle, and many more industry thought leaders to explore how to maintain best of breed security for the distributed IT enterprise as perimeter controls and borders dissolve.

https://www.issa.org/ciso/?p=435#2

Feb 27-Mar 2, 2012 – San Francisco, CA

RSA Conference

RSA Conference 2012 attendees will have the opportunity to meet with Oracle Security Solution experts, see live product demos, and more by visiting the Oracle Security Solution Showcase (Booth #2425). Exhibit show floor hours: February 27th, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m., February 28th, 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., February 29th, 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. and March 1, 11:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=139125&src=7259262&src=7259262&Act=10

Feb 28-Mar 1, 2012- Santa Clara, CA

Strata Conference - Making Data Work 

Strata Conference is the leading event for the people and technology driving the data revolution. The home of data science, Strata brings together practitioners, researchers, IT leaders and entrepreneurs to discuss big data, Hadoop, analytics, visualization and data markets.

http://strataconf.com/strata2012

Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) Regional Events:

Feb 14-16, 2012 – Denver, CO

RMOUG (Rocky Mountain OUG) Training Days

RMOUG Training days is one of the largest regional user group conferences in the USA. This is the place to network with local information technology professionals as well as talk to internationally renowned Oracle experts. This year’s schedule includes topics on Oracle Database 11g features, Public Cloud, Oracle Database Appliance, Exadata and Database Security, just to name a few. Visit website for more info. 

http://www.rmoug.org/

Feb 14-15, 2012 – Portland, OR and Seattle, WA

Oregon and Southern Washington Oracle Users Group Meeting.

Topics will include Grid Control 12c, Understanding Big Data and Hadoop and Exadata.

http://www.oswoug.org/OSWOUG/Home.html

Feb 23, 2012 –Redwood Shores, CA

NOCOUG (Northern California OUG) Winter Conference

Located at Oracle Headquarters, the Winter Conference will feature 3 tracks, with a keynote on Big Data from VP of Product Management –Mark Townsend. Topics will include Accelerating Oracle Performance, Oracle Database Security, Best Practices for upgrading Oracle Database 11g, and more.

http://www.nocoug.org/index.html

From An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology

 

Continuing on in my 101 series - I wrote about associative arrays, nested tables and

Oracle Database 11g is now on Google+ !

Adding to our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook presence, the Oracle Database team has launched a Google+ page. There's already been some open dialog, and plenty of new assets and events posted. Get social and join other members of the Oracle Database world to network, and expand your knowledge of working with Oracle Database. If you're on Google+, add us to your circles! We look forward to seeing you there.

Tell us how we're doing!

We want to keep improving. So feel free to give us feedback on the page, and let us know what topics you would like us to cover more of in the future.

From An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology

 

A nested table is much like an associative array but you do not determine the index. The index grows by using the extend command and the index is always an incrementing integer value. You can use the DELETE attribute to delete individual elements so you will always want to

Big Data Essentials: What You Need to Know

Big data is big news these days. But you don’t base IT investment decisions on magazine headlines.

Join us for the Big Data Online Forum to learn the essentials of big data—from the technology underlying it to real-world use cases. Oracle’s Tom Kyte, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, and other industry thought leaders will be on hand to explain how big data can deliver revolutionary insight and competitive advantage.

You’ll get answers to tough questions surrounding big data, including:

• What business insight can big data uncover?
• How do you manage big data?
• How do you integrate big data into decision-making?

Register today for this half-day online event featuring live Q&A with big data experts.

Agenda 10:00 a.m. Keynote: Big Data: Are You Ready?
Tom Kyte, Senior Technical Architect, Oracle 10:30 a.m. Big Data Panel Discussion
Michael Olson, Chief Executive Officer, Cloudera
Mark Townsend, Vice President, Database Product Management, Oracle
John Akred, Senior Manager, Technology R&D, Accenture 11:00 a.m. Acquiring Big Data
David Segleau, Director, Database Product Management, Oracle 11:30 a.m. Organizing Big Data
Jim Steiner, Vice President, Database Product Management, Oracle 12 noon Analyzing Big Data
Jean-Pierre Dijcks, Senior Principal Product Manager, Database Product Management, Oracle 12:30 p.m. Conquering Big Data
Helen Sun, Director, Enterprise Architecture, Oracle 1:00 p.m. Closing Session—A Gartner Perspective on Big Data
Merv Adrian, Vice President, Research, Gartner

Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates.
All rights reserved.

Live Webcast
Learn Best Practices for Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds
Thurs., January 26, 2012  10am PT / 1pm ET

Database consolidation onto the right private cloud architecture can alleviate the challenges caused by traditional, inefficient environments. Benefits include higher quality of service, lower costs, and reduced complexity.

Join Oracle experts Willie Hardie and Mark Townsend as they explain the business case for a private database cloud and describe the architectures that best suit your business and IT requirements.

You will learn how database consolidation onto private clouds can help you:

• Achieve greater consolidation for higher return on investment
• Reduce complexity with standardization and fewer configurations
• Increase quality of service and lower IT costs

This is your opportunity to ask questions and learn about consolidation best practices onto private clouds.

Register for this live Webcast

From An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology

 

 

A record type is a simple structure that combines multiple datatypes into a single package.

 

DECLARE
  TYPE r_person IS RECORD (
    fname VARCHAR2(30),
    lname VARCHAR2(30),
    age NUMBER );
	
  v_person r_person;	
BEGIN

 v_person.fname := 'Lewis';
 v_person.lname := 'Cunningham';
 v_p  

CallSource deploys Oracle Database Appliance with a few mouse clicks--and experiences great results with a highly available database solution that monitors and manages itself out of the box.

In the video below Jason Scinocca, Chief Technology Office of Callsource reports that:

“It’s incredibly simple.  The appliance itself manages, monitors, optimizes, and tweaks itself.  With the appliance I no longer have to have a consulting group and/or a person on staff to manage."

Live Webcast:  Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture and Oracle Exadata

Thursday, January 19, 2012 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET
In today’s competitive environment, your systems need to be available 24/7, 365 days a year. When systems are down, you run the risk of dissatisfying customers, incurring penalties, and, most importantly, losing revenue. Attend this Webcast to learn how Oracle’s maximum availability architecture for Oracle Exadata Database Machine will help protect your systems from unplanned outages, and provide both high availability and data protection at the lowest cost and complexity. You’ll learn how to:

• Achieve the highest levels of database availability at the lowest cost and risk
  
• Implement the industry’s most-stringent data protection solutions
  
• Adopt MAA post deployment operational best practices for Oracle Exadata

Learn how to prevent downtime and data loss and get the most out of your Oracle investments.

Register today!

Maximum Availability. Lowest Cost and Complexity.

To get where you want to be in life, you need to have goals. It doesn't matter if you want to advance professionally, improve a hobby or lose weight, goals help you achieve your desires.

 

I think it's important to look back at the previous year and see how you did as far as your goals. When I see how realistic my previous year goals were, then I can decide how to set my goals for the current year. Unfortunately, I didn't list my goals for 2

New Engineered System and Oracle Big Data Connectors Help Unlock the Value of Enterprise Big Data News Facts

• Oracle  announced the availability of Oracle Big Data Appliance to help customers derive maximum business value from Big Data.
• Oracle Big Data Appliance is an engineered system of hardware and software that incorporates Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop with Cloudera Manager, plus an open source distribution of R.
• Running on Oracle Linux, the system also features Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition and Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine.
• Oracle today also announced the availability of Oracle Big Data Connectors, a software product that helps customers easily integrate data stored in Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL Database with Oracle Database 11g.
• Together with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Oracle Big Data Appliance with the Oracle Big Data Connectors software delivers everything customers require to acquire, organize and to analyze Big Data within the context of all their enterprise data.

Read the full press release

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Happy New Year! Here are upcoming Oracle events in January 2012

Jan 17, 2012 – New York, NY

NYOUG Winter 2012 Training Session, 9-5PM @ St. John’s University

Visit http://www.nyoug.org for agenda and abstract.

Jan 19, 2012 – Reston VA

Oracle Public Sector 11g Database Hands-On Workshop

The Oracle 11g New Features, Hands-on Workshop, which is designed for DBAs, Developers, Architects & Administrators, will focus on the following new and enhanced features: Partitioning for Performance & Manageability, Advanced Compression for Lower Cost, Oracle Database Manager Diagnostic & Tuning for Easier Manageability & Performance Turning. Sign up here.

Jan 23, 2012 – Blue Ash, Ohio

GCOUG Presents “Tom Kyte Day” at Oracle Corp, 9987 Carver Road, Suite 250.

For more information and agenda visit the GCOUG website. http://www.gcoug.org/

Jan 24, 2012 – Long Beach, CA

SOCOUG Presents “Oracle 2012 Winter Conference and Tech Expo” at the Westin

Featured speaker Tom Kyte, topics include Big Data, Oracle Database Appliance and more. Check http://www.socoug.org/ for more information

Jan 25, 2012 – Irvine, CA

SOCOUG Training Day with Tom Kyte

Don’t miss your chance to attend SoCOUG’s 1st Annual Training Day event being hosted by Oracle legend, Tom Kyte. This is a unique opportunity to hear updates and insights in an intimate setting as Tom provides a deep-dive look! into the world of Oracle Database! For more info and signup - http://www.socoug.org/

Jan 26, 2012 – San Diego, CA

Oracle Customer Showcase Forum – Hotel Palomar 8am-3pm, San Diego, CA.

During this interactive event, attendees will hear from Oracle guru Tom Kyte and also have an opportunity to network with Oracle solutions experts, partners and business associates!

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to gain new insights and meet with members of the Oracle community to discuss implementing a comprehensive platform for your business and IT processes–connecting strategy with success across the enterprise.Sign up here

Please plan to join us Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 10:00 AM PST

for our LIVE Webcast: 

Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture and Oracle Exadata

Maximum Availability. Lowest Cost and Complexity.

In today’s competitive environment, your systems need to be available 24/7, 365 days a year. When systems are down, you run the risk of dissatisfying customers, incurring penalties, and, most importantly, losing revenue. Attend this Webcast to learn how Oracle’s maximum availability architecture for Oracle Exadata Database Machine will help protect your systems from unplanned outages, and provide both high availability and data protection at the lowest cost and complexity. You’ll learn how to:

• Achieve the highest levels of database availability at the lowest cost and risk
  
• Implement the industry’s most-stringent data protection solutions
  
• Adopt MAA postdeployment operational best practices for Oracle Exadata

Register now to learn how to prevent downtime and data loss and get the most out of your Oracle investments.

From An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology

 

I rarely, if ever, bring up politics. Currently the US Congress is considering legislation that I think is reprehensible. I really can't believe that we, as a nation, have come to this. I have been reading about this for a while. I guess I have been in denial that it would really happen.

 

Have you heard of

Technologist of the Year awards recognize individuals in key roles for their extraordinary efforts and contributions to enterprise technology solutions. Global winners are selected for early-adopter and groundbreaking uses of Oracle technology and for defining their roles in a way that makes the industry take notice. Check out all the Oracle Excellence Awards 2011 winners in the January/February 2012 online issue of Oracle Magazine.

CRN.com, a leading resource for IT solution providers, has named the Oracle Database Appliance the best enterprise appliance of 2011:

“Oracle has combined the high-end hardware it acquired in the deal for Sun Microsystems, with its Oracle Database 11g, and brought to market a trailblazing appliance aimed at value-added resellers and SMBs. With up to 12 TB of storage, dual Intel Xeon processors and price of $50,000 (with a pay-as-you-grow model), the Oracle Database Appliance delivered by far the best enterprise appliance of the year.”

The Oracle Database Appliance is a simple, reliable, and affordable solution that helps customers to:

• · Save time and money with plug-and-go deployment, automated management and single vendor support.
• · Eliminate deployment risk with a fully integrated and tested database appliance.
• · Replace inefficient, aging servers with the latest, most advanced database infrastructure.
• · Seamlessly scale with pay-as-you-grow software licensing that eliminates the hassle, cost, and downtime usually associated with hardware upgrades.

To learn more about the Oracle Database Appliance click here.

Here are a few new stories of customers' success with Oracle Exadata

• Asiana Airlines Improves Business Efficiency with Oracle Exadata Database Machine

Asiana IDT selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine to deploy a high-speed BIS integrating and processing more than 12TB of airline reservation, ticket issuance and shipping data from various operational systems. The new platform enables Asiana Airlines to magnify business visibility and maximize revenue through timely and well-informed decisions.

• Digicel Haiti Implements Oracle Exadata Database Machine to Help Meet Business Objectives

To support the company’s growth in subscriber base, implemented a half-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 in July 2011. Analysis and report performance has improved across the board with reports showing response time gains of 16x without any changes. Daily reports are now processed and delivered each morning to assist the business in strengthening and refining their sales strategies and campaigns.

• BNP Paribas CIB Speeds Information Processing with Oracle Exadata Database Machine

  A half-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine has helped BNP Paribas better manage this data growth and improve system performance. The Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression feature of Oracle Exadata Database Machine is used by the bank to compress the size of its active data, leading to easier data management and more efficient use of storage. BNP Paribas is achieving 17x greater throughput without any changes to existing applications.
  

About Oracle Exadata Database Machine

One of the easiest ways to understand something is to see a visualization. Looking at Active Session History (ASH) data is no exception and I’ll dive into how to do so with R and how I used R plots to visually present a problem and confirm a hypothesis. But first some background…

Background

Frequently DBAs use the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) as an entry point for troubleshooting performance problems and in this case the adventure started the same way. In the AWR report Top 5 Timed Foreground Events, the log file sync event was showing up as the #3 event. This needed deeper investigation as often times the cause for longer log file sync times is related to longer log file parallel write times.

Top 5 Timed Foreground Events
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                                                           Avg
                                                          wait   % DB
Event                                 Waits     Time(s)   (ms)   time Wait Class
------------------------------ ------------ ----------- ------ ------ ----------
log file sync                     3,155,253       9,197      3    6.4 Commit

Drilling into this a bit deeper the two log file events reported the following in the Foreground Wait Events and Background Wait Events sections of the AWR report:

Foreground Wait Events
-> s  - second, ms - millisecond -    1000th of a second
-> Only events with Total Wait Time (s) >= .001 are shown
-> ordered by wait time desc, waits desc (idle events last)
-> %Timeouts: value of 0 indicates value was < .5%.  Value of null is truly 0

                                                             Avg
                                        %Time Total Wait    wait    Waits   % DB
Event                             Waits -outs   Time (s)    (ms)     /txn   time
-------------------------- ------------ ----- ---------- ------- -------- ------
log file sync                 3,155,253     0      9,197       3      1.0    6.4

Background Wait Events
-> ordered by wait time desc, waits desc (idle events last)
-> Only events with Total Wait Time (s) >= .001 are shown
-> %Timeouts: value of 0 indicates value was < .5%.  Value of null is truly 0

                                                             Avg
                                        %Time Total Wait    wait    Waits   % bg
Event                             Waits -outs   Time (s)    (ms)     /txn   time
-------------------------- ------------ ----- ---------- ------- -------- ------
log file parallel write         659,157     0        526       1      0.2   18.2

It is generally always worth looking at the breakdown of these times, as they are averages. We really want to understand the entire histogram of these wait events. For that we can look at the Wait Event Histogram section of the AWR report as below.

Wait Event Histogram
-> Units for Total Waits column: K is 1000, M is 1000000, G is 1000000000
-> % of Waits: value of .0 indicates value was <.05%; value of null is truly 0
-> % of Waits: column heading of <=1s is truly <1024ms, >1s is truly >=1024ms
-> Ordered by Event (idle events last)

                                                    % of Waits
                                 -----------------------------------------------
                           Total
Event                      Waits   <1ms  <2ms  <4ms  <8ms <16ms <32ms  <=1s   >1s
-------------------------- ------ ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
log file parallel write    661.6K  84.7   9.7   4.7    .4    .1    .3    .0
log file sync              3138.K  14.0  42.8  30.4   7.9   2.3   2.6    .1

Wait Event Histogram Detail (64 msec to 2 sec)
-> Units for Total Waits column: K is 1000, M is 1000000, G is 1000000000
-> Units for % of Total Waits:
   ms is milliseconds
   s is 1024 milliseconds (approximately 1 second)
-> % of Total Waits: total waits for all wait classes, including Idle
-> % of Total Waits: value of .0 indicates value was <.05%;
   value of null is truly 0
-> Ordered by Event (only non-idle events are displayed)

                                                 % of Total Waits
                                 -----------------------------------------------
                           Waits
                           64ms
Event                      to 2s <32ms <64ms <1/8s <1/4s <1/2s   <1s   <2s  >=2s
-------------------------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
log file parallel write       52 100.0    .0    .0
log file sync               3535  99.9    .1    .0

One thing that you should notice here is there are two sections of Wait Event Histogram; the buckets less than 32ms and buckets greater than 32ms. It is also important to note that only the absence of a value means no timings fell into that bucket -- so even though the report shows .0 there are still events in that bucket (read the section description as it mentions this).

We can see from the second histogram section that there were 52 times that log file parallel write was over 64ms as well as 3535 times log file sync was over 64ms. At this point a hypothesis is formed that the two events are correlated -- that is, the belief is the long log file parallel write events may be causing the long log file sync. To find data that supports the hypothesis (or not) we can look at the Active Session History (ASH) data to get a more granular view of the wait events.

Diving Into The ASHes With R

If the hypothesis is correct, the ASH data should show times where we observe long log file parallel write and long log file sync waits. One could write SQL against V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY to collect all the samples that may demonstrate the hypothesis -- e.g. collect a list of sample ids for each event and examine them for overlap, but a visualization is worth a thousand words.

One way to get quick and easy visualizations from ASH data is to use R. R has become a very popular tool for those doing statistical analysis and it has some quite useful graphing and plotting packages built in. R can connect to Oracle via a JDBC package which makes importing data trivial.

Here is a plot that I put together using R for ~300 sample ids (~5 minutes) from ASH (recall that TIME_WAITED is in microseconds):

As you can see from the plots, nearly every time there is a long log file parallel write there are also numerous long log file sync events. This data supports the hypothesis.

Averages Suck

Most any statistician (or anyone keen on numbers and stats) will tell you averages suck. This does not mean averages are not useful, but one has to keep in mind averages can hide infrequent outliers (which may make them a tad bit evil). For instance, AWR is reporting an average of 1ms for log file parallel write but we can see that there are several that are falling in the 20ms range in the 5 minute capture. If we zoom in on the graph (set the y axis at a max of 3ms), we can understand why:

Most of the log file parallel write events are coming in around 0.5ms so even with some 20ms outliers it still yields an average of 1ms, thus hiding the magnitude of impact for the outliers. This is why drilling down into the ASH data was important for us to understand the scope of the issue.

With More Data Comes More Questions

At this point, the visualization of ASH data shows a strong correlation between log file sync and log file parallel write outliers, but the root cause has not yet been identified. Perhaps there is more insight lurking in the ASH data?

Given this is an OLTP workload and log file parallel write is an IO operation, perhaps it's worth looking at another IO operation like, say, db file sequential read - single block IO times.

In the below plot, I've taken a 60 second window of ASH data and plotted all the db file sequential read events.

Interestingly, there are several samples where the IOs are taking significantly longer than most -- the majority are below 10ms but we see a few samples where there are groups in the 20ms or more range. Let's add the log file sync events to the plot.

Hmmm... even more interesting. The data is showing a correlation between log file sync and db file sequential read. Any bets on what the plot looks like if log file parallel write is added?

Very interesting. The data is showing us that all 3 events are correlated strongly. Clearly we are on to something here...and using R to plot the ASH data was an easy way to present and understand it visually.

Summary

While this blog post did not go into specific root cause, it was a healthy journey in debugging and data driven analysis. Keep in mind that just because AWR averages look good, don't overlook the fact that the event histograms should also be reviewed to see if there are outliers. R allows an easy way to put scatter plots of event times together to get a nice visual of what is going on.

Source Code

Here is the code I used to do the analysis. It's pretty straight forward and well commented (I think). Enjoy!
I'll also mention that I use the RStudio IDE for R.

From An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology

 

An array is one way to store multiple variables in a collection. In PL/SQL we will often refer to an array of objects as a collection. If a record is a way to think of a specific row in a table, a collection type can be thought of as the rows in the table.

 

The original pl/sql table that was offered in pl/sql is the index by table also