Oracle Open World 2016 – Day 1

Oracle Open World 2016 started on Sunday. The first day is always reserved for presentations provided by members of the various Oracle User Groups. However, the last part of the day is the first Keynote from Larry Elison. But let’s start by some of the sessions I visited Sunday:

Ludovica Caldara: Migrating to Oracle Databases 12c: 300 databases in 300 days.

Ludovica provided a presentation about the experience he gained during the migration project of 300 databases to 12c: Issues they faced and things to consider when migrating to 12c.
The main recommendations to avoid performance issues after the migration to 12c were related to SQL Plan Directives. I do not want to go into too much detail on the topic, but one issue Ludovica’s customer faced in terms of SQL Plan Directives was related to high CPU utilization at specific, fixed times when a system-job called the function DBMS_FEATURE_AWR. For details on this subject see here.
Other things to consider are the Oracle recommended patches from MOS-Note 2034610.1 (Things to Consider to Avoid Poor Performance or Wrong Results on 12.1.0.2).

Franck Pachot: Single-Tenant Oracle Database 12c: Multitenant Features for All Editions

In his excellent session Franck presented about some good reasons to go to Single-Tenant databases instead of running the deprecated Non-Container databases (i.e. the only way DBs could be run up to 11gR2 with 1 DB per Instance). Among other things the possibility to transport a database to another machine by un-plug and plug-in and 12.2.-security features were mentioned (use of the new lockdown profile, which can e.g. disable database options for a pluggable database).

Mauro Pagano: SQLd360: SQL Tuning Diagnostics Made Easy

Being very excited about the free software SQLd360 Mauro developed (see here), he enthusiastically presented the history of tuning single SQL-statements during the various phases of available tools and database features:

• 1998, when not much data was available about the history of a SQL-statement
• 2007, when SQLTXPLAIN became very popular
• today with the availability of SQL_MONITOR and Active Session History

Bottomline is that SQLd360 should be the tool to use today to tune a single SQL-statement, because of various advantages compared to SQLT(XPLAIN) (took the following list from here):

• not necessary to install something on the database
• SQLd360 is 100% free software, while SQLT requires a My Oracle Support (MOS) account, and some consultants and third parties may struggle to obtain a valid login for MOS or would have to use their client’s credentials.
• SQLd360 makes use of newer technologies including Google Charts, presenting the metadata in a very “Wow!” way, while SQLT focuses on HTML tables.
• SQLd360 is 13X smaller in terms of lines of code, and it pretty much does the same job as SQLT
• SQLd360 is much faster to execute than SQLT.

Sunday Keynote by Larry Ellison:

Remark: I do not talk about the Cloud here (almost all of the Keynote was news about Oracle’s Cloud), as I want to concentrate on what’s coming on the DB-side.

First info on Oracle DB 12c Release 2:

• Multitenant
  Agility with on-line clones and on-line relocate
  4095 PDBs possible (255 in 12.1)
• Sharding: A shared nothing architecture where databases on different nodes form a logical database.
  It provides elastic scalability with native sharding for global-scale applications.
• In-Memory
  Column-Store on Active Dataguard
  Increased performance (up to 60x faster than 12.1)