Chicago Oracle Users Group Meeting March 1st 2018 – Recap

Our Chicago Oracle Users Group meeting on March 1st was our first meeting of 2018.  We had legendary Oracle Architect Graham Wood and three Oracle ACE Directors.  Thank you Graham Wood, Bjoern Rost, Rich Niemiec, and Jim Czyprunski for bringing us four outstanding presentations!

Agenda

We held the meeting at Hoffman Estates Village Hall.  The meeting space had ample room for all attendees and plenty of extra room for the abundance of food we had.  The meeting had four presentations, breakfast and lunch, raffles, and a whole lot of networking!

Presentations

A lot of knowledge was shared with us on this day!  🙂  Here are the titles of what was presented:

• Everything You Know Is Wrong: DBA Intuition, Meet Hard-Core Metrics
• Architecture Review by AWR: How the Real World Performance Group Reads an AWR
• Streaming Oracle to Apache Kafka: Stories from the Message Bus Stop
• Oracle 18c Best New Features

Morning Sessions

First, to get our meeting started, Jim presented on Everything You Know Is Wrong: DBA Intuition, Meet Hard-Core Metrics.  Jim taught us that metrics is where it’s at and not to rely on any sort of “gut instinct”.

His two examples in this presentation really demonstrated how as experienced as we may be, we can get it all wrong by not using metrics available to us at various levels (operating system, database, etc).  This was by far my favorite presentation that Jim has given to date.

Second, we had the great honor of legendary Oracle Architect, Graham Wood, present to us on Architecture Review by AWR: How the Real World Performance Group Reads an AWR.  He took us through a presentation of what they look for in database AWR reports followed by a step by step analysis of an AWR report.

His method on how to read the AWR report shed some some new perspective on both approach and key things to look for.  Graham requested to send him some AWR reports in advance from our members for him to review, which he shared his findings in the meeting.  We could have listened to him dissect AWR reports all day long!  🙂

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 Bjoern’s presentation on Streaming Oracle to Apache Kafka: Stories from the Message Bus Stop.  This is a perfect example of technologies outside of the Oracle space but used in conjunction with the Oracle database that are allowing companies to be innovative.

In fact, as a DBA you should be looking at the future as data stewards, and can use a tool such as Kafka to propel solutions to certain business issues that you might not be able to do with the Oracle tools you currently have.

Finally, our last presentation of the day was by Rich Niemiec on Oracle 18c Best New Features.  Rich’s presentation demonstrated the awesome new features in what could be the best version of Oracle yet, 18c.

While some of these features are most helpful to the DBA, there were plenty of features that Rich pointed out that the developer could leverage.  You can read all about the Oracle 18c new features right from the Oracle documentation here.

Breakfast and lunch as well as the rental of the meeting space were sponsored by ViON.  Thank you ViON!  We raffled off several of Jim Czuprynski’s book, Oracle Database Upgrade, Migration & Transformation Tips & Techniques.  ViON also raffled off a GoPro that went to one of our lucky members.  Thanks again for everything!

All presentations are available for download on the COUG Web Site in our member’s section.

Finally, if you haven’t already, make sure to sign up as a COUG member (free!).  This will allow you to not only receive our emails about future meetings but also download past presentations.