Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

If you read my posting the other week
about getting over to Open
World, you’ll be interested to know that I managed to get hold of a
complementary pass courtesy of the OTN team. All of the Oracle ACEs have been
given passes for the event (Thanks, Vikki) and it looks like there’ll be a few
events for us to take part in, such as "Meet the Experts" sessions in the OTN
lounge and a night out at the start of the event. Last year I got to meet up
with Justin Cave, Todd Trichler (the guy behind OTN’s

Linux "Installfests") and some guys who worked for Space Adventures, the
company that runs sub-orbital space flights and who were working with Oracle on
a developer promotion at the time. This year should be an interesting Open
World, what with the new intake of Peoplesoft and JD Edwards users, but I’ve
also heard that there’s going to be far less "third-party" or "user group"
presentations this year, as most of the slots are being taken up by Oracle
presentations. Certainly, ODTUG didn’t do a call for papers this year (at least
a public one) so I won’t be presenting over there. I was thinking of asking
whether there were any spare slots at the ODTUG BI&W SIG session to do a
presentation - if anyone from the SIG reads this and there’s a chance to speak,
can you let me know?

Talking of presentations, I’m currently working on a new article for DBAZine
on Oracle OLAP performance tuning. I’ve picked up quite a few tips and
techniques over the past couple of years, and in addition there’s quite a bit of
OLAP performance tuning stuff out there (metalink, OTN Forums postings, the
docs) but as yet no single article or paper that sets out best practices and a
methodology. Also, in the spirit of showing rather than telling, I’m currently
working through sets of examples and I’ll include these in the article, so that
readers can load up the data themselves, try out the techniques and judge for
themselves whether the approach is valid. What I’m planning to cover in the
article includes;

• creating optimal cube designs - numbers of dimensions, use of
  hierarchies, calculating sparsity, estimating cube size, init.ora
  parameters, storage options
• building the cube - rules for measures and cubes, use of composites /
  compressed composites
• loading the cube - effect of sparsity settings on load time / cube size,
  tracing load progress, incremental v. full loads, use of views to simplify
  loading
• aggregating the cube - incremental aggregation, effect of sparsity
  settings
• query the cube - tracing OLAP DML / OLAP API commands, improving query
  performance, use of V$ views, SGA / PGA settings
• quick overview of what’s in 10gR2 - custom aggregates, incremental
  refreshes

The article is due for submission mid-August so should be out and published
by the end of August / start of September.

There’s another couple of Oracle blogs that are worth making a note of. Anjo
Kolk, the man behind YAPP and OraPerf, has started his
Oracle Performance blog and in the
first couple of postings looks at YAPP ten years on, an issue with a customer
around physical I/O performance problems and the impact of long Seek times on
the total I/O response time. I met Anjo briefly last year when I introduced his
Open World talk and I’ll certainly be keeping his blog bookmarked. Similarly,
you might have heard me mention a site called Oracle-Base in the past (articles
on

performance tuning enhancements in Oracle 10g, 

string aggregation techniques and so forth) and now Tim Hall, the guy behind
the website, has started the
Oracle-Base blog which has ended up becoming one of the sites I check out
most days. It was interesting seeing Tim’s photo as I’d always pictured him in
my mind as being an elderly bearded professor-type (his professional title is
"Dr. Tim Hall") but he’s actually a youngish bloke who does yoga and karate in
his spare time. So there you go.

Finally, I’m going to try and organise a "blogger dinner" for one night
during the UKOUG Conference next October in Birmingham, and maybe try and do
something similar over at Open World in September. If you’re an Oracle blogger
(or part of the community) I’ll try and drop you an email shortly to see if the
idea’s a goer, but in the meantime please feel free to drop me a line if it’s
something you’d be interested in.

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