Advert: Symposium Countdown

I submitted my slides last Friday so the Hotsos Symposium countdown has really started now - I'll be presenting in just under 4 weeks time. I'm looking forward to it even more than I was for a couple of reasons.

1) I noticed from Kerry Osborne's blog post that he's now doing two presentations. I was looking forward to seeing Kerry present anyway and it looks like his second presentation is about some of the AWR scripts that he's written and I find myself returning to all the time and passing on to other on-site.

2) The good folk at Hotsos took pity on me and my sick server, which has been throwing out mysterious I/O errors intermittently over the past few months while I've been trying to test Parallel Query in 11.2. In the end, I just felt that I didn't have enough decent material for me to feel comfortable presenting it so they're letting me do my Pictures presentation instead I've only ever done it once in the U.S. and there were about 10 people in the room, most of whom I knew (!), so it's still pretty new and I'm enjoying including the 11.2 stuff too. However, I'm not prepared to suffer flaky demos any more, as I did at UKOUG, so have just ordered a Dell XPS16 with one of those funky i7 CPUs and an SSD drive. Hopefully it will make things a lot smoother! It should also facilitate the 11gR2 Parallel experimentation - I don't need real-world performance or DOPs, just enough to illustrate features without my laptop grinding to a halt! So, the Parallel stuff isn't done - I'll be doing that at MOTS - but delayed for now.

As usual, I'm really looking forward to this one. I was having beers with a couple of the best techies at work the other night, neither of whom are completely convinced about the value and technical depth of conferences and I told them this is the one they should think about going to. What I forgot to mention was the number of new friends I met at Hotsos. If anyone is thinking of 'cliques', these were people who I wouldn't have known from Adam but the fact that Hotsos is small (500 attendees) and everyone who is there has a keen interest in Oracle performance means that you're likely to meet plenty of like-minded people.

Oh, and where are the technical posts? Well I interrupted the first of a possibly long series of posts on optimiser stats to write this. Those technical posts take a little longer, just getting the examples right, but things should start looking up soon. With my low posting frequency over the past few months, I'm not exactly short of things to write about.