Tuesday, November 01, 2005
UKOUG - Thoughts so far
Just some quick observations before I go attend Lisa Dobson's presentation on how to be a newbie.
If you are arranging a big conference, do try to make sure you hold it in a city with reliable power. Central Birmingham losing all power just as registration opens for 2500 delegates was not a good thing. The organisers did fantastically well to keep day one on track.
A note for foreign visitors. If you intend to visit Birmingham for the UKOUG conference, make sure you ask for the ICC and not the 'Conference Centre'. You will be sent to the NEC which is bigger, better and miles away. Of all people you'd have thought the HOTSOS guys wouldn't make unwarranted assumptions about the number of conference centres in a given location.
Tom Kyte was excellent yesterday, showing some cool sql stuff, most of which I'd come across before but a really neat trick that might be used for outer join elimination in some circumstances.
Connor McDonald did his usual 800 slides in 2 minutes. This actually worked really well as the subject - here are some cool features - can lead the unwary into just implementing, being told that a feature is available but not how to do it means you have to read and test.
Last but not least Jonathan Lewis did a fantastic entry level intro to the CBO detailing some strategic decisions you have to make, and the principle of cost based optimisation - that the cost of a query is the estimated runtime of that query.
1 Comments
If you are arranging a big conference, do try to make sure you hold it in a city with reliable power. Central Birmingham losing all power just as registration opens for 2500 delegates was not a good thing. The organisers did fantastically well to keep day one on track.
A note for foreign visitors. If you intend to visit Birmingham for the UKOUG conference, make sure you ask for the ICC and not the 'Conference Centre'. You will be sent to the NEC which is bigger, better and miles away. Of all people you'd have thought the HOTSOS guys wouldn't make unwarranted assumptions about the number of conference centres in a given location.
Tom Kyte was excellent yesterday, showing some cool sql stuff, most of which I'd come across before but a really neat trick that might be used for outer join elimination in some circumstances.
Connor McDonald did his usual 800 slides in 2 minutes. This actually worked really well as the subject - here are some cool features - can lead the unwary into just implementing, being told that a feature is available but not how to do it means you have to read and test.
Last but not least Jonathan Lewis did a fantastic entry level intro to the CBO detailing some strategic decisions you have to make, and the principle of cost based optimisation - that the cost of a query is the estimated runtime of that query.
1 Comments:
To be fair, power outages in Birmingham are very rare. That was the first one I can remember in many years that affected more than one building. The single building ones are usually caused by the occupants trying to save money by not upgrading the power supply when they move their data centre in, then wondering why everything goes quiet when they turn on the air conditioning.
I've been caught up in a few power cuts when visiting London.
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I've been caught up in a few power cuts when visiting London.
