Chicago Oracle Users Group Meeting March 28th 2019 – Recap

The Chicago Oracle Users Group meeting on March 28th was our first meeting of 2019.  We had William Smith, Chief Architect for Vendita and Maria Colgan, Master Product Manager for Oracle Corporation present on five different topics for us.

Agenda

We held the meeting at the Schaumburg Library.  The meeting space had ample room for all attendees and plenty of room for all the food we had.  The meeting had five presentations, breakfast and lunch, raffles, and a whole lot of networking!

Presentations

We had a day filled with presentations and here is what was presented:

• An Insider’s Guide to Oracle Autonomous Database
• Test Drive Automatic Index Creation in Oracle Autonomous Database
• Best Practices for Managing Optimizer Statistics
• Explain the Explain Plan- Interpreting Execution Plans for SQL Statements
• Master Automation Sequencer (MAS)

Morning Sessions

First, Bill presented on Vendita’s Master Automation Sequencer (MAS).  An interesting presentation on the benefits that this software can bring in automating all kinds of tasks that database administrators are normally bogged down with.  If you are looking for something to free up your DBAs time, this is something to look into!

Our second presentation was by Maria on An Insider’s Guide to the Oracle Autonomous Database.  Maria did an amazing job demonstrating the simplicity in setting up and managing an Oracle Autonomous Database in the Oracle Cloud.  More information on the Oracle Autonomous Database can be found here.

Maria’s third presentation was on Test Drive Automatic Index Creation in Oracle Autonomous Database.  This is just what the database administrator has been looking for!  Let the database engine determine when and where to create indexes.  Maria went over how this works in the Oracle Autonomous Database and I know I’m really looking forward to using it real soon!

Next, we took a break for lunch and our members took this opportunity to get some networking in.

Afternoon Sessions

After lunch, we started the afternoon with Maria presenting on Best Practices for Managing Optimizer Statistics.  This presentation had some great working examples that our members enjoyed hearing about and interacting with Maria on.  I personally liked the example on using AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE which showed how it has the speed of collecting statistics with a sample size of 10% but the accuracy of 100%.

Finally, our last presentation of the day by Maria was on Explain the Explain Plan- Interpreting Execution Plans for SQL Statements.  This was our most fun and engaging presentation of the day.  She held our members attention throughout the presentation and we learned some new things about explain plans.

That’s a Wrap!

Breakfast and lunch were sponsored by Vendita.  They also raffled off four Amazon echo’s.  Thank you Vendita!

All presentations are available for download on the Chicago Oracle Users Group Web Site (COUG).  If you are interested in learning more about the Oracle Autonomous Database as well as the automatic indexing features (plus much more), make sure to try it for FREE using the $300 in free cloud credits from Oracle

Finally, if you haven’t already, make sure to sign up to receive our notification of our upcoming COUG meetings.