This evening, with four days to go, I popped up and down the aston expressway, which I presume most attendees to the conference by car will use to see what a mess the council are making.
I was pleasently surprised, while there were meny cones, they were in the side of the road and not yet in use.
So I continued to paradise circus to see the impact of it’s ‘closure’.
Essentially paradise circus is no longer a roundabout and there is no longer any direct access to broad St.
So if you come down the aston expressway and take the road over the roundabout, then through the first tunnel and then avoid the second tunnel, you will be brought round an sent south and end up exactly the same place as if you’d taken the second tunnel.
To access broad St from here you need to go round the pagoda roundabout (after dark the radison blu may be more visible), back in the direction you just came from and then take the left turn down Holiday St. which runs parrellel to Broad St and will be behind the majority of the hotels that most attendees will be staying in.
I honestly don’t see any issues for attendees arriving on Sunday. However, anyone attempting this route on Monday morning should anticipate additional delays.
Filed under: Uncategorized — bigdaveroberts @ 2:05 am
Apologies to all attendees, at least those arriving by car.
Birmingham has engaged in a pletora of road building, building demolition and unneccisary/premature road closures/diversions.
While i have found several pages describing the work, i’d sugest you use google and only beleive half you read on websites with birmingham.gov.uk in the url.
However, for those arriving by train, there is better news.
The redevelopment of new St station is complete, although I’d caution against getting caught short in that vicinity:
Unusually, frequent bloggers Tim Hall and Martin Widlake were absent from the attendees at Oracle midlands January event.
So for the benefit of the absent, a review of the 2 talks.
The first talk by eDBAs James Anthony was on the topic of the new in memory option
I had attended a couple of talks by @SQLMaria at #ukoug_tech14 on this topic so assumed that I wouldn’t get much new from this session.
I was wrong, the first half covered the theoreticals of the new functionality, which overlapped heavily with the sessions I had previously attended.
However, eDBA had been part of the beta program and James proceeded with an analysis based on real world data-sets, with real figures for the actual levels of compression achieved, which without intelligent column selection didn’t come close to the figures quoted by Oracle.
However with the intelligent selection of columns for the in memory option, the figures came incredibly close to the theoretical figures quoted by oracle.
The fact that the Syntax for selectively caching columns was obscure was observed. The fact that selective caching appears to be crucial to get the greatest benefit from this new functionality makes this complexity an anomaly.
I suspect an intelligent algorithm will be introduced in a future Oracle release to make this functionality more beneficial out of the box.
The second talk by Yves Colin was on a specific bottleneck that was observerd and resolved by paralleliasing the target database table.
This second talk was lighter on the theoretical and heavy on the practical demo aspect.
This was a good thing, because I would have not believed the observations in the talk without the demos.
In essence the question was how do we reduce a bottleneck on inserts by a combination of changes to partitioning and indexing.
The issue appeared to be caused by the fact that the date/time of the data measurement was causing hot blocks that were acting as a bottleneck.
The solution was not as expected.
I would have expected that moving the date time from being the first entry in the index would resolve the hot block problem.
However the requirement was to improve the insertion rate without compromising the performance of the reporting function.
The result was by changing the partitioning and keeping the counter intuitive index, then acceptable insert performance was achieved without compromising reporting performance.
In short, a session that explains to you that what you thought you understood was wrong is so much more useful than a session that adds details to the level of knowledge that you already know on a subject.
In essence, more complex scenarios need testing, simple rules of thumb break down very quickly outside of the most simple scenarios!
Ultimately one session that unexpectedly added to my knowledge and one session that blew a hole in what I thought I already knew.
An evening well spent.
#OM8 due Tuesday 03 March 18:00 – 21:00 at Innovation Birmingham, Faraday Wharf, Holt St, Birmingham B7 4BB
Edition based redefinition and plug able databases.
Apart from the poor choice of hash tag, the inaugural event went well.
The 2 talks were by stalwarts of the SIG and conference circuit Tim Hall and Pete Finnegan and excellent as to be expected.
I have to admit, I’d attended both talks previously, Tims at a ukoug conference and Pete’s at this years uk oak table world conference.
I also have to admit, either Tim has updated the presentation since I last heard it, or I’d forgotten a lot. Pete’s talk, was much more recent in my mind, and my notes from the talk were still in my latest notepad, so I could compare!
It is apparent that Pete talks around his slides using them as an aid memoir, as while most of what he said was the same, it wasn’t in the same order as my notes. A sign perhaps as to how comfortable Pete is with his area of expertise.
I think a very high standard has been set with this first event, let’s hope we can keep this going at the same high level!
I think most people understand the deal with UKOUG:
You do a presentation, you get a free pass.
UKOUG prefers new presentations on new topics that have not been presented before. Then you are expected to provide white papers and presentation slides for uploading to the website.
Oak table world (http://www.scaleabilities.co.uk/oaktable-world-uk-2013/) is a slightly more informal affair, where presentations will be by Oak Table members and the topics can cover anything from spectrum games programming to the best of core oracle technical presentations.
For those that could make it and for those that couldn’t, but are still interested the following is a list of the presentations and the associated materials that I could locate on the internet.
Monday 2nd December 2013
Calculating Selectivity
09:00-10:00 Jonathan Lewis
I have been unable to locate a download of this presentation, however Johnathan’s blog states: “On Monday from 9:00 to 10:00 I’ll be presenting “Calculating Selectivity” (a shortened version of the presentation I’ll be giving at RMOUG 2014 in February)”
RMOUG have in the past made the presentation slides freely available, so we may need to wait till then for a copy of this presentation.
Hacking session: Advanced profiling of oracle using function calls
10:15-11:00 Frits Hoogland
I am presuming that this is the same presentation as the one he provided at the RMOUG 2013 conference.
Oracle 12c Automatic Data Optimization and Heat Map
16:35-17:35 Joel Goodman
Joel works for Oracle in various roles. Often his presentations are based on copyrighted Oracle content and usually no handouts are provided. (If you want access to the original material you can always go on the formal course!)
Filed under: Uncategorized — bigdaveroberts @ 12:25 am
I hadn’t expected to attend this years conference having given up my membership earlier this year, however due to unforeseen circumstances I was free on Tuesday 3rd December and resolved to pop up and catch up with friends and acquaintances.
I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised by the simplicity of the journey by road, with convenient parking close to both the convention center and my chosen hotel (The Juries Inn).
In lew of finding anyone I already knew, I adopted the first group of delegates I found that were seeking out post educational activities.
It became quickly apparent that there didn’t seem to be anything but upmarket/trendy drinking establishments within easy reach of the conference center and there were few enough of those.
It is with some fondness that I heard tales of the Tap and Spile mentioned and expressions of disappointment at the lack of a similar facility conveniently located close to the convention center.
After sampling both the local hostilities, I imposed myself on another unsuspecting group and moved on to a rather fine Indian restaurant. (zaikarestaurants.co.uk)
I find it both strange and comforting that having split the bill ten ways an appropriate sum of £42 was required to satisfy the proprietor and providence.
In conclusion, the venue seems to be well supported with practical amenities, but slightly lacking in social ones. Possibly some further research is required of the area slightly father out, however I suspect, should the conference return to this venue, it might prove worthwhile making another appearance, however brief.
