Day 1 Oracle Open World

Hello Everybody

this is my report of the first day at the Oracle Open World, my trip here was not easy, I spent Sunday since 2PM flying here and arrived Monday at 9:50 AM, during the trip my luggage was lost, but I am not going to bore you with the details.

I did not arrived on time for the opening keynote of Charles Philip but friends told me that it was good. There was a Keynote on Sunday which I also missed, but this time was Larry Ellison the speaker, he spoke about Oracle and its beginnings and today everybody has made comments about how good it was.

My first meeting was "The fastest and most cost effective backup for Oracle Database" by Sean McKeown. Sean is the manager for the system administrators in the Oracle Global IT organization, he was explaining how Oracle saved 1.5 million dollars using Oracle Secure Backup (OSB), Oracle Secure Backup is a media library manager from Oracle, In the future you won't need for third party media library managers to backup Oracle databases to tape. The product only works for Oracle databases and with certain hardware, they couldn't say if in the future it will work for non Oracle databases, however my guess is that it wont.

OSB supports virtual library tape, if you are not familiar with the term it is just making the backup to a disk that looks like a tape to your server, later on the information is backup to tape from that special disk and the space taken by the backup is released.

One curious thing is that is the System Administrators and not the DBAs the ones that take care of the backup and recovery of information at Oracle, the DBAs just need to be sure that RMAN is setup properly. Oracle is using OSB for their email, they serve more than 70,000 employees and the amount of information they store is pretty big. He said that Oracle secure backup was 20 to 50% faster than the Veritas solution and a lot cheaper too, it is just 3K per tape drive. OSB does not backup the undo tablespace.

My second meeting was "Oracle 11g next generation of high availability" by Sushil Kumer. In this session he talked about flash back query, flash back version which I was not familiar with (you basically can tell the database to show you the transactions that happened between 2 date time you choose), he spoke about flash back database, class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">ASM (Automatic Storage Manager), flash back table (none of this are new) , what is new is flash back transaction, he said that now Oracle is intelligent enough to know all the dependencies of a transaction and flash it back eliminating the need for you to guess what a particular process did and what tables touched. Flashback is free with

Flashback has become very popular as a test tool since you can bring back the whole database to the original state after you test any process, and it is a lot simpler and faster than restoring and recovering your database.

In a regular DR scenario the correction time = error time + f(db size), with
flash back the correction time = error time

He said a lot of Oracle customers has been asking to flash back longer periods but until now the product was not designed to support that, in 11g Oracle introduced flash back data archive which allows you to go back years using the same flash back architecture.

My third meeting was "The best Oracle 11g new features" by Rich Niemic. This was probably the best meeting I had so far, however he did not go technical and spend 15 min. making jokes, no that the jokes were not good, but when you have the opportunity to get to Rich in front of you, you want to get the most out his time.

He said that Oracle in 11g did not added a lot of new features but they focused in improving the current features and it was his opinion that 11g was the beta version of Oracle with the best quality ever. He said Oracle did improvements automating the backup to disk, now it does data corruption validation so you know that the backup is corrupt before you need to restore it. He said more people now is using backup to cheap ATA disks.

Rich spoke about Data recovery adviser, now you don't have to think about what is the best way to recover your database in the less time, Oracle will recommend it to you.

In Data guard now can synchronize disk mirroring, and in 11g you can have a snapshot standby and been recovered at the same time, let me explain that. In the past you could use your read only standby for reporting (read only) but while the database was open it was not applying the transaction log from the primary, you had to close the database and place it in recovery mode again so it apply the changes. In 11g you can have the database open read only and the transaction log is been applied at the same time.

11g has a feature called real patch application where making use of grid control and if Oracle detects an error it can apply a patch to fix the error online. Also Oracle is doing their best to deliver all their future patches making use of rolling patches in RAC, same with the Database upgrade.

In 11g you can do online table and index redefinition online, yes I know you will say you can do it in 10g too, the difference is that is 11g there is no locking.

He said that in 11g you only have to set 1 parameter and that parameter is memory_target and that includes your PGA and your SGA.

In 11g there is a new parameter called result_cache_mode, using this parameter you can ask Oracle not to cache the results, in addition you can flush the db cache. The cache in 11g is more intelligent therefore improving performance.

In 11g there are invisible indexes, which are useful if you want to know how an application with lots of indexes will behave if you drop some of them, but without the need to drop them. If you make the index invisible Oracle will ignore it, and if you really need the index all you have to do is make it visible again.

He said people usually rebuild indexes online while what they should be doing is coalescing the indexes.

In 11g Oracle introduced a simple integer data type saving space and speeding up transactions. 11g also introduced a lot of improvements in ADDM, there is also a Global ADDM which access the entire cluster performance information.

11g introduced the SQL Plan management (SPM) which basically is a tool that records what is going on and can play it back.

Oracle is deprecating Outlines and replacing it with SQL Plan base line.

There are also improvements in grid control 11g for performance. You can capture baselines, then use the sql access advisor and sql repair advisor.

The SQL Performance analyzer captures performance and allows you to run the same in other environment, at the end it provides you a graphic comparison between environments.

Real Application testing captures your database workload and allows you to replay it in another system, which this features you an test different version of software and architectures.

Partitioning just got better with the interval clause, now if you forget to specify the maximum value for the partition or a partition gets out of range you will not get an error are long as the interval parameter is specified. In other words the interval is telling Oracle what interval to use to create new partitions when data is out of range and now you can compress partitioned tables.

Oracle is introducing Oracle Secure Files which is faster than using lobs. Oracle also did improvements on the optimizer statistics , now you have an auto sampling feature. You can also gather stats and not publish the stats until you are not ready.

There is also a new feature where Oracle understand the correlation between different column tables and behave different depending of the utilization. You can have multi column, multi table stats. They also included several security enhancements which he did not detailed.

My last meeting for the day was the keynotes with Andy Meldensohn, he is the Senior product manager for the database, he went over some of the new features for the database again, and some of their customers implementing and taking advantage of those features spoke as well. The CIO of eHarmony said that they tried using SQL Server 2005 clustered environment but did not provided them the scalability they needed so they switched to Oracle RAC.

More information tomorrow.