Rittman Mead at the Hotsos Symposium 2012, Dallas

Last week I was very proud to present at the Hotsos Symposium 2012, in Dallas, Texas, on the new Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. It'd always been a personal objective of mine to speak at the Hotsos event, as I'd seen it as the "ultimate" technical Oracle conference albeit focused on the database, rather than anything to do with BI, but when Exalytics was announced and I could see the obvious interest most data warehouse DBAs would have with the new product, I thought it'd be worth submitting an abstract.

In the end, it all got a bit hairy towards the end as the box I'd planned on testing against doesn't actually arrive until later this month, but I was able to create a demo on a VM and show the principles, and I think the session went down pretty well. Thanks to all of those that attended, and gave me encouragement before I presented, and if you're interested the slides are downloadable here, and also viewable online below, using Slideshare.

So apart from my talk, I spend most of the week doing research and writing for the book, and also attending as many sessions as I could. I was particularly glad to see Doug Burns' two sessions - one on statistics for partitioned objects that was particularly useful for the DW work that I do, and another on "ASH" analytics and new database performance visualisations that are available in Enterprise Manager 12c.

For anyone who doesn't work with the Oracle Database day-to-day, ASH is short for Active Session History, and is a sample-based real time view of the "wait events" that are contributing to the response time of your queries. By using some of the features shown by Doug in his session, you can analyse ASH data over time, and over other dimensions, to view what contributed to the time taken by a query to run in the recent past. The beauty of using ASH data, rather than trace data that you have to specifically enable for a session or application, is that it's there for situations where you didn't know there'd been an issue, but then someone comes and tells you that, at a certain time yesterday, queries against the data warehouse were running slow. If you're interested in understanding more about this topic, there's a Youtube video (not by Doug, unfortunately) that shows how ASH Analytics works.

Of course, I was also pleased to catch up with some more colleagues and friends from the Oracle Database world - Jonathan Lewis (pictured above, about to hypnotize some volunteers from the audience), Bryn Llewellyn, Doug and Maria Colgan from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland respectively, Cary Millsap, Alex Gorbachev, Tom Kyte and Tim Gorman from the States and Canada, and people like Wolfgang Breitling who's articles I've read in the past but never really got to meet in-person.

One nice surprise for me though was to meet Tanel Poder for the first time, along with another chance to speak with Kerry Osborne, who along with some other colleagues from Enkitec ran the excellent first-night reception and "Exadata vs. Oracle Database Appliance" debate. I can see lots of parallels between how Enkitec and Rittman Mead run our businesses, so it was great to catch up with both of them and have a good chat about technology and business. Here's the Enkitec guys taking part in the panel, with Tanel about to say something clever but subversive about Exadata:

Well I'm back now from Dallas and back working on the final chapter of the book, and going up to London and further afield next week for client meetings. Then I'm off to the OUG Ireland Conference in Dublin to talk about Oracle Data Integrator for OWB Developers, then straight over to Oslo for the OUGN Annual Conference, which once again is being held on the Color Magic cruise liner traveling between Oslo and Kiel. Quite a few of the Hotsos presenters are also going to the OUGN event, so it'll be nice to catch up with everyone again, and do my first in-depth talk on Exalytics, over one-and-a-half hours.