Absolutely inspiring day, with 3 renowned Oracle performance experts in Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth & Graham Wood sharing the stage the entire day, giving their insights from the developer, dba and system architect perspectives.
The format was very conversational, with a discussion about the principles behind a topic, examples the presenters have encountered and then demonstrations of how changing values or coding approaches impacts performance. There is nothing quite like seeing a live demonstration of row by row processing compared with set based processing, or how setting open_cursors too high can bring down performance.
Materials from the presentations are available:
The day started with a data warehouse story of an ETL performance issue, with the networking team, dba and BI teams in a room, each saying their piece of the puzzle was fine; the database was idling, network was performing fine and the ETL process hadn't changed, but overall performance had recently degraded...
Deja vu, at this point a DBA colleague from work and I looked across at each other - we had been it this exact position a few months earlier. The discussion from the experts around this was insightful; if only they had been present when we were tearing our hair out trying to solve the issue.
The day only got better from there on. Tom even mentioned the APEX 4.0 and Library Cache Latch Contention issue in Oracle DB 11.2.0.2.
If you get the opportunity to attend a Real World Performance Day as they tour the globe, I highly recommend it.
