Mar 10: Hotsos 2010 - Day 3 - An excellent one (part 2)
In the end my work call fell through so I had the unexpected opportunity to see Marco Gralike's XML presentation. Despite the fact that he was scheduled opposite Tanel Poder talking about performance fundamentals, which impacted the number of attendees, I thought it was terrific. I had my own brief flirtation with XML around 10 years ago but, contrary to my expectations, there was lots for me to learn here and it was interesting to see how much more mature Oracle's offering is these days. I suppose 10 years is a long time, but a lot has happened while my back was turned.
The slides were excellent, the pace was good (although he did run over a little) and I could actually understand what he was saying for a change
I walked away very impressed and when I was talking to a couple of his attendees at the bar later, it seems I wasn't the only one.
Another unexpected bonus was that Henry Poras had to cancel for personal reasons and although I was extremely disappointed by that because we share interests, replacements don't come much better than former Sun luminary Bob Sneed, who is now an independent consultant, available for hire.
His presentation was about one of his favourite topics, CPU Quality of Service. Rather than just measuring how much CPU is available or being used, we need to drill down into how it is being used. Even a 100% busy system does have available CPU really when you think about it, because if we could make our application more efficient, that would release CPU or perhaps we're exceeding our SLAs and could reduce CPU consumption and still reach our SLA targets?
But, most of all, it's about the quality of the resource delivered to applications that need it. He walked through a number of case studies of 4x to 16x system performance improvements, some as simple as changing scheduling strategies and some down to bug fixes or application architecture tweaks to improve Cycles Per Instruction (CPI) figures. Chip architectures seem complex these days so although the O/S thinks the CPU is busy, who knows what it's busy doing?
My final presentation of the day was Kerry Osborne's Scripts. I enjoyed his presentation as much as I enjoy his blog posts. He's a very down-to-earth and modest guy but clearly has shed-loads of practical experience and a great way of communicating it. He was bothered a little by a slightly slow network connection but, frankly, I don't know what he was whining about. That man has no idea what a demo problem is! I really liked his attitude towards his scripts, too - take them, use and abuse them, knock yourself out! Well, his scripts have helped me many times over the past year. A good guy.
After that, I was just about ready for a beer so adjourned to the bar with Marco hoping to catch up with Kerry and buy him a beer I'd promised him. It was 4:30 at this stage and I lazily decided to skip the last session. The usual daily tiredness was starting to kick in which wasn't helping but, in retrospect, curing it with alcohol probably wasn't the smartest strategy! Carol Dacko and Kevin Closson showed up and it was good to get another chat with them because I don't get to see either of them often. Kerry turned up eventually and, although I may have bought him that promised drink, I'd have to admit that he did all the leg-work by going to the bar and bringing a large round of drinks back. Saved me a trip
Slowly it began to dawn on me that my planned trip back to my room to freshen up and change before the party was in jeapordy as the clock ticked around until 7:30 and I noticed Kyle Hailey's other half unbuttoning his shirt to the navel in preparation for Disco Night. (Check the start time above - 3 hours drinking *before* the party and, as usual, no food.) It's little wonder that I was quite as drunk as I was, unusually so, believe me. Although I think I just about managed to behave myself, it was a close-run thing. As I pointed out to Alex and Marco, you always know when a Scotsman is truly drunk because he starts declaring his undying love for all and sundry. I think at one point I was actually trying to seduce Alex, but he was having none of it! Oh, my god, I think I was dancing for a few minutes!
Time to draw a discrete veil over the day, I reckon.
The slides were excellent, the pace was good (although he did run over a little) and I could actually understand what he was saying for a change
I walked away very impressed and when I was talking to a couple of his attendees at the bar later, it seems I wasn't the only one.Another unexpected bonus was that Henry Poras had to cancel for personal reasons and although I was extremely disappointed by that because we share interests, replacements don't come much better than former Sun luminary Bob Sneed, who is now an independent consultant, available for hire.
His presentation was about one of his favourite topics, CPU Quality of Service. Rather than just measuring how much CPU is available or being used, we need to drill down into how it is being used. Even a 100% busy system does have available CPU really when you think about it, because if we could make our application more efficient, that would release CPU or perhaps we're exceeding our SLAs and could reduce CPU consumption and still reach our SLA targets?
But, most of all, it's about the quality of the resource delivered to applications that need it. He walked through a number of case studies of 4x to 16x system performance improvements, some as simple as changing scheduling strategies and some down to bug fixes or application architecture tweaks to improve Cycles Per Instruction (CPI) figures. Chip architectures seem complex these days so although the O/S thinks the CPU is busy, who knows what it's busy doing?
My final presentation of the day was Kerry Osborne's Scripts. I enjoyed his presentation as much as I enjoy his blog posts. He's a very down-to-earth and modest guy but clearly has shed-loads of practical experience and a great way of communicating it. He was bothered a little by a slightly slow network connection but, frankly, I don't know what he was whining about. That man has no idea what a demo problem is!
I really liked his attitude towards his scripts, too - take them, use and abuse them, knock yourself out! Well, his scripts have helped me many times over the past year. A good guy.After that, I was just about ready for a beer so adjourned to the bar with Marco hoping to catch up with Kerry and buy him a beer I'd promised him. It was 4:30 at this stage and I lazily decided to skip the last session. The usual daily tiredness was starting to kick in which wasn't helping but, in retrospect, curing it with alcohol probably wasn't the smartest strategy! Carol Dacko and Kevin Closson showed up and it was good to get another chat with them because I don't get to see either of them often. Kerry turned up eventually and, although I may have bought him that promised drink, I'd have to admit that he did all the leg-work by going to the bar and bringing a large round of drinks back. Saved me a trip
Slowly it began to dawn on me that my planned trip back to my room to freshen up and change before the party was in jeapordy as the clock ticked around until 7:30 and I noticed Kyle Hailey's other half unbuttoning his shirt to the navel in preparation for Disco Night. (Check the start time above - 3 hours drinking *before* the party and, as usual, no food.) It's little wonder that I was quite as drunk as I was, unusually so, believe me. Although I think I just about managed to behave myself, it was a close-run thing. As I pointed out to Alex and Marco, you always know when a Scotsman is truly drunk because he starts declaring his undying love for all and sundry. I think at one point I was actually trying to seduce Alex, but he was having none of it! Oh, my god, I think I was dancing for a few minutes!
Time to draw a discrete veil over the day, I reckon.
Tracked: Mar 11, 02:04