Sneak Peek and what can come of it

Last Tuesday we did a Preview of the upcoming OPP (Oracle PL/SQL Programming) Conference which will be held in Atlanta, Georgia soon.

This preview took place in our office in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. About 17 people attended this free preview. At regular intervals we do free “Knowledge Center” presentations. Keep a close eye on our Agenda to see future events.

My colleague Patrick Barel, who will be doing three presentations during the OPP conference, did two presentations during this preview. Before dinner, a nice Chinese Buffet, Patrick did a session on Pipelined Table Functions. Pipelined Table Functions offer you ways to integrate SQL with PL/SQL functionality. They can really be a great performance booster. The last session he did was on Collections. Associative Arrays, Nested Tables and Varrays were the topic. It still amazes me that even though Associative Arrays have been around for a long-long time, a lot of developers are still pretty unknown with this powerful functionality. If you are scratching your head and wonder which “things” I am talking about, maybe you are familiar with the old names: “PL/SQL Tables” or “Index-By Tables”. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, go to Patrick’s session on Collections.

After dinner I also did a rerun of the presentation I gave during the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 conference; “SQL Holmes and the Case of the Missing Performance”. This presentation is a Case, based on a true story, about a performance investigation. Step by step we go through the different tools to use when investigating a performance issue. Best tool to use: your Brain. Making assumptions about what’s happening is not going to solve performance problems. “Oh, it must be doing this. We can solve it like that”, without making sure you have found the cause… I always enjoy giving this presentation maybe because of the twists and turns in the story line. Hopefully the audience gets involved in the story and come up with alternate solutions. And so far, each time I’ve given this presentation I succeeded. Usually the next day I have some emails discussing some solutions or “how did you do that?”. And that’s always nice. This happened again after Tuesday’s presentation, I received an invitation for another speaking engagement…. pretty cool.