UKOUG 2015 Day 1 (Monday): a short overview.

Ref: Oracle In-Memory, all about table locks, Dbvisit, Oracle Multitenant and Open Source Tuning tools.

Today was my first day in the Oracle UKOUG 2015.

My first presentation focussed on the “Oracle Database In-Memory Option: Challenges & Possibilities”by Christian Antognini.
This option was introduced in Oracle version 12.1.0.2 and promises to deliver in-memory performance without modifying the application’s code. 🙂
After a short explaining of the general concepts of the Oracle Database In-Memory option, the aim of the presentation was to review what you can expect from this new technology. We received (with help of demos) a good overview on situations where you can take advantage of it and what kind of benefits you should expect when enabling it. But take care “it depends” on each situation you are and when you will enable it … you have to clearly define what you want to enable in In-memory (the memory is not unlimited) !!

Also this morning, another good presentation by Frank Pachot (dbi-services) focussed on “All About Table Locks: DML, DDL, Foreign Key, Online Operations,…”.
Some topics or questions (listed below) was really good explained with help of demos:
– Do you know exactly what is locked when you do an online or offline DDL?
– Do you know the meaning of the lock modes (RS,RX,S,SRX,X)?
– Do you know when and why you need to index foreign keys?

This afterrnon after lunch …
Presentation about Oracle Standard Edition by Chris Lawless (Dbvisit).
It was a good refresh and review about Standard Edition 2 (SE2). SE with some limitations but we received clearly answers like what you are able to do with SE vs EE.
We talked about SE and High Availability (different 3th party Standby solution and not only Dbvisit), Disaster Recovery as well as Backup and Recovery (RPO+RTO).

After that a complete different presentation by Mike Dietrich (Oracle Master Product Manager) about “How Oracle Single/Multitenant will Change a DBA’s Life”!
Interesting for our future DBA’s life! It seems that Oracle has announced future deprecation for the traditional stand-alone database architecture that will be replaced with “Oracle Multitenant databases” (in one single PDB environment). Mike strongly recommended to start the evaluation and testing of PDB’s in your environment so that you have a good overview for the future migration strategies into the pluggable databases world. Some features will clearly change the databases concept and the life of a DBA.

And last good presentation by Bjoern Rost about “Open-Source Database Tuning Tools and Life Without EM12c”.
Clearly, not every Customer have the appropriate license or database edition to perform Tuning tasks without EM Cloud Control 12c.
We have seen (with help of demo’s) and received a list of a few free open-source database tuning tools such as Rlsqlplus, web-ash, Snapper, oraSASH, SQLT, sDB360 and sqld360 that can be used by DBA’s to gather and review metrics and wait events from the command line or graphically.

This days in Birminghan was really an intensive day but very interesting.
The UKOUG event is really a technical event allowing us to share technical information with other DBA.