Oracloid Blog

I first presented on Oracle 10g Block Change Tracking Internals at UKOUG 06 in Birmingham. It was very well received, but there were quite a few gaps in my knowledge, and I later discovered I was incorrect in some places. I’ve done some additional research, filled in the blanks and corrected in a few places.

The wrong part concerned which processes track changes in blocks. I assumed it was database writers when in fact it’s a shadow process changing the block that produces change-tracking entries. I also added details on how this info is passed to CTWR process, which SGA memory areas are used for that, and how both of these impacted by the number of CPUs. In addition, I mentioned hidden parameters that are related to block change tracking.

The presentation and white paper are available for download. If you didn’t happen to be at the presentation itself, I suggest you look at the paper rather than the slides — it has more details and is easier to follow.

Unfortunately, I focused too much while preparing on the new areas I wanted to cover in this session, and didn’t invest enough time in reviewing the whole presentation and old material. Imagine my shame and embarrassment when I actually forgot a few slides and had to actually look at some of them for few seconds to recall what they were about. I also found that the audience was less interested than that at UKOUG in this level of internals. In the end, the presentation didn’t go as well as it did in Birmingham, so I learned an important lesson this day: never overestimate your knowledge of the topic and always vigorously review your presentations, even those repeatedly delivered.

Nevertheless, there were folks very interested in the details and since I was getting those much-needed nods during my session, I had some confirmation that the audience (or at least part of it) was following the thread. I think next time I should include the demo in presentations with a similar level of internal details — that should make it a much better experience and more lively for the audience.

Looks like our blog has turned into a MySQL blog over this week, so I have to do something about it. Luckily, I have zillions of pending posts, so I’ll start with posting my presentations materials from this conference with my remarks on how it went in general.

On Monday, I was presenting about Oracle 10g Grid Control Extensibility and, as an example, we created a new plug-in to monitor a MySQL database target. (Wait, I said I wanted to dilute our MySQL topics this week, didn’t I?)

This presentation was based on the material I prepared for the UKOUG Conference 2006. I learned that that audience was a bit overwhelmed by the details, so I introduced a live demo this time, switching to it between the slides. Since there was also a paper available in addition to presentation, I could afford to skip some detail; this let me slow down a little so that the pace was much more comfortable for the audience.

You can download the archive including presentation, paper and all examples. I recommend you follow the paper — it’s much better structured and more suitable for independent study compared to the presentation. The sample code and MySQL plug-in packaged into the Management Plug-in Archive (MPA) is available as well.

I have had great responses from the attendees and I found that interest in the topic was much higher compare to that from Birmingham in November last year. I don’t know if that’s because more DBAs started to look to Grid Control over the last half a year or because of some geographical influence: IOUG is attended predominantly by a North American audience compared to European-oriented contingent of UKOUG. It seems as though Grid Control has not been widely adopted in Europe.

On Monday evening, I took part in the Oracle 10g Grid Control Speaker Panel. The panel was moderated by Dr. DBA Ken Jacobs. Panel speakers besides me included Gaja Krishna Vaidyantha, Rich Niemiec, Leng Tan, Martin Pena, and Arup Nanda. I think it was the most successful speaker panel of the event — lots of interesting questions from the floor, and a lot of interest from attendees. I learned that Grid Control is being widely adopted, and that lots of Oracle shops consider Grid Control the tool-of-choice for Oracle database monitoring and administration these days. Many of the attendees were interested in extending the use of Grid Control to other areas of their IT infrastructure (the Grid, if you wish).

Stay tuned - more to come.

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