AOUG – Real World Performance Tour

This week, Tom Kyte, Graham Wood and Andrew Holdsworth were present in Europe for several dates. One of the events was organised by the Austrian Oracle User Group (AOUG) in collaboration with the German and Swiss User Group (DOAG and SOUG) and I had the chance to be there to attend to one session of the Real Worl Performance tour session in Vienna.

I think there is no real need to present the Real World Performance group: since many years they are present at different events to discuss on database performance topic.
Their goal is to show some situation you may already know and you can get the best performance of the database. To convince people they came with live demos and even if Wireless network does not always cooperate we were able to see all demo and see the point. You may have already seen some of them.

One day is a very short time but they are some important points not to forget:

• There is no universal answer for all situation
• To get best performance, the best is to use the product as it’s designed
• To improve performance, you have to accept to change something and not only on database side

A moment of reading an AWR report was one of the most interesting part. We can extract a lots of information from a single report and we retrieve more often than we want some common issues. Who spoke about famous “Select 1 from dual;”?
Yes even big databases can suffer from simple problems.

I think there is too much DBA’s in the room and not enough developers and application managers. And I don’t want to blame them I know for sure that it’s something that can interest them. Instrumenting the application is very easy and some developers use their own code because nobody told them before that you can do this in the database very easily.

It may sound obvious but if you want good performance you have to accept to change something and we can’t always work just at the bottom of the stack on the database to solve something that can be improved a lot in the algorithm of the application. So developer and application manager have their place at such event.

The message is and we also try to explain in it Tuning workshop, teams should work together to get the best performance.
I can strongly encourage you to have a look on the videos and go to one event and spread the message.