Hotsos Symposium 2011

The 2011 Hotsos Symposium begins in just a little over a month (March 6) and I can't wait! I've been fortunate to have attended every Symposium except one (last year) since these events began. When I was asked to conduct the Training Day following this year's main Symposium (the Training Day is on March 10) I was honored to accept and thrilled that I would be back in attendance this year.

I believe the Symposium is unique in many ways. It is the one and only conference that I know of focused specifically on Oracle performance. Over the span of just a few days, attendees are privileged to hear the best speakers from all over the globe. This year's event is overflowing once again with a stellar line-up of presenters on topics such as "Database I/O Performance" (Alex Gorbachev), "Contemporary Latch Internals" (Andrey Nikolaev), and "Five Things Every Programmer (and DBA) Should Know about Oracle" (Andrew Zitelli). Cary Millsap will be delivering his award-winning presentation "Thinking Clearly about Performance" and Kerry Osborne will be delivering the Keynote address as well as presenting on "Tuning Exadata". The week will end up with Tom Kyte's birds-eye view of the week's sessions as he provides his representation of those topics in the insightful and engaging way only Tom can.

I have the privilege of following this great line-up of speakers by presenting the Training Day. My topic (albeit a very wordy title) is "Managing SQL Performance - Practical Information and Tools for Writing and Maintaining Optimally Performing SQL". I'm looking forward to sharing many of the things I do every day that help me to take poorly performing SQL and making it hum! Don't you just love it when you can get a win like reducing a query's response time from nearly an hour down to a few seconds?! I know I do. The thing is, it isn't magic. Admittedly, it's fun to have people shake their heads in wonderment when I'm able to accomplish such "miracles", but I'll share my secrets for how I go about doing it. Well, OK...they're not really secrets. What I do is simply the application of a systematic, repeatable approach that anyone can learn and utilize. Like anything, the more you practice, the better (and faster) you get at the process.

I think one of the most fun things about becoming more and more proficient at optimizing SQL is that you appear to have abilities that seem almost magical. I thought I'd share this video where Penn & Teller demonstrate how what seems like magic can be uncovered and shown to be just well-timed execution of known and practiced actions.



I hope the Training Day will allow me to show you what lurks under the covers and make the magic seem practical for you! See you there!