Cool Stuff

This is not really anything new - in fact Tanel Poder has already blogged about it a while ago. Tanel has specifically covered the handling of "urgent" TCP packets and how this could be used to signal a "cancel" to another process, however this only works on Unix environments and not with Windows SQL*Plus clients. In Tanel's article it is also mentioned that there is an officially documented way of doing this via the Resource Manager if you happen to have an Enterprise Edition license.

In my quick tests however the call to DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.SWITCH_CONSUMER_GROUP_FOR_SESS using "CANCEL_SQL" as consumer group only errors out with ORA-29366 saying that the specified consumer group is invalid.

If you work with SQL Trace files (and profile them) then you should check out the awesome novel use of the “external table preprocessor” feature explained by Adrian Billington here:

• http://www.oracle-developer.net/display.php?id=516

Ironically just a day after writing my “Evil things” article, I noticed a note in MOS about how to enable an event 10384 at level 16384 to get a parallel plan to be executed in serial:

Relax, I’m talking about the Oracle Database kernel here, not the corporation ;-)

Here’s a couple of more reasons why not to play around with undocumented debug events unless you’re really sure why and how would they help to solve your specific problem (and you’ve gotten a blessing in some form from Oracle support too):

So, what he hell is that V8 Bundled Exec call which shows up in various Oracle 11g monitoring reports?!

It’s yet another piece of instrumentation which can be useful for diagnosing non-trivial performance problems. Oracle ASH has allowed us to measure what is the top wait event or top SQLID for a long time, but now it’s also possible to take a step back and see what type of operation the database session is servicing. 

I am talking about Oracle Program Interface (OPI) calls. Basically for each OCI call in the client side (like , OCIStmtExecute, OCIStmtFetch, etc) there’s a corresponding server side OPI function (like opiexe(), opifch2() etc). 

I’m mentioning this again just in case you missed the announcement (because I posted it on the weekend):

There will be anotner free Secret hacking session – about full scans, direct path reads, object level checkpoints, ORA-8103s!

It will happen tomorrow, Tuesday 9th August, online!

Register here:

• http://blog.tanelpoder.com/seminar/secret/

We have been secretly planning something with Kerry Osborne – and now it’s official – we will host The First Exadata Virtual Conference in the World, on 3-4 August 2011.

This conference takes place a couple of weeks after our Expert Oracle Exadata book is published (on 18. July – check out the awesome new cover design). So, we thought it’d be a good idea to run this conference, where we can explain some things in a different format, do live demos and answer questions that attendees have.

On the first day Kerry and Randy will talk about some serious fundamentals of Exadata, like how Exadata Smart Scan Offloading works and how to make the IO resource manager work for you (especially important in mixed workload consolidated environments).

And on the second day we’ll dig even deeper, with Andy Colvin talking about how to survive Exadata patching (he has patched more Exadatas than anyone else I know) and me following up with some complex performance troubleshooting stories I’ve encountered recently (trust me – there’s a LOT of issues to troubleshoot ;-)

About the Conference:

Since its release, Oracle Exadata quickly became a hit. Due to the relative “youth” of Exadata technology and internal behavior changes introduced with frequent patch-sets, there’s not much up-to-date quality technical information and know-how available to public. This virtual conference brings you a chance to learn from the leading Exadata experts, from their experience of working with real Exadata environments, from Exadata V1 to the latest X2-8. Additionally, there is plenty of Q&A time scheduled, so you can also get answers to your Exadata-related questions.

The speakers are probably some of the most experienced Exadata consultants in the world, in the field of Exadata deployment, migration, performance, and troubleshooting. Also, Kerry, Randy and Tanel are the authors of the #2970a6; text-decoration: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;\" href="http://blog.tanelpoder.com/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-feed-statistics/feed-statistics.php?url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5hcHJlc3MuY29tLzk3ODE0MzAyMzM5MjM=">Expert Oracle Exadata book published by Apress in July 2011.

Dates:

• 3-4 August 2011

Location:

• Online (or should I say “the Cloud” ;-)

Duration:

• 8am – 12pm (PST) on both days – 2 x 1.5h sessions on each day, with Q&A sessions and a break in between

Speakers:

• Kerry Osborne, Randy Johnson, Andy Colvin from Enkitec
• Tanel Poder from right here :-)

All of the speakers are hard-core hands-on professionals, having worked on many different real-life (production) Exadata environments of their clients. Enkitec dudes didn’t stop there, they bought a half rack for themselves, just for playing around with it. Yeah (+1 from me), some people buy a red hot Ferrari, some buy a red hot computer rack with an X on it :-)

Price:

• 375 USD (early bird until 22. July), 475 regular price

More information, abstracts and registration:

• http://blog.tanelpoder.com/seminar/expert-oracle-exadata-virtual-conference/

I don’t think you’ll find an Exadata learning opportunity like this from anywhere else (and any time soon), especially considering the price!

This conference is so hot, that one of the attendees managed to sign up to it even before I had published this page to the world! :-)

I just noticed that Jonathan Lewis has announced that he’s writing a new Oracle (fundamental) internals book, due to be out in November.

So, I’m happy to add to Jonathan’s announcement, that I’m the tech reviewer of that book!

After all the hard work on the Exadata book, I didn’t want to hear about working on any book again (even if it’s just tech reviewing work), but as this is Jonathan’s book, about exactly these topics I love and focus on, I had no choice but to make an exception and become a reviewer ;-)

I’ve already reviewed a couple of chapters and this book is going to be awesome!

In May I received the IOUG Select Journal Editor’s Choice Award for my Systematic Oracle Latch Contention Troubleshooting article where I introduced my LatchProfX tool for advanced drilldown into complex latch contention problems (thanks IOUG and John Kanagaraj!).

As the relevant IOUG webpage hasn’t been updated yet, I thought to delay this announcement until the update was done – but I just found an official enough announcement (press release) by accident from Reuters site:

• http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/12/idUS279518+12-May-2011+BW20110512

Woo-hoo! :-)

The article itself is here:

• http://tech.e2sn.com/oracle/troubleshooting/latch-contention-troubleshooting

Thanks to IOUG crew, John Kanagaraj and everyone else who has read, used my stuff and given feedback! :-)