Posted by The ACE director briefings are over and Oracle Open World has kicked into full swing. The scale of the event is staggering and its a challenge just finding sessions to go to. This is not due to insufficient sessions – just the challenge of sifting through 100+ concurrent sessions, spread across multiple locations and timeslots…
I started the day with a “Beginners Performance Tuning” session – really just to see what kind of turnout would be at a beginner’s style session. What was very interesting was the demographic of the attendees. A large amount of them looked amazed and awestruck as some fairly basic and stock standard principles were introduced. This was good to see, in that, when you’re a dinosaur like me, and have been around a lot of this stuff for ages, its easy to forget that for a great many people – the Oracle technology is a brand new beast…and a very very large one at that 
So I’ve set myself the task of doing something similar for the Perth conference. A tuning session that is really for the novice, trying to answer the question: “My SQL is slow….now what”
At the other end of the spectrum, sat in a talk about library cache structures, and how mutexes are (have) replaced latches as the preferred serialisation mechanism. Perhaps not a topic for those new to the database
Learning is not a spectator sport 