Third Planboard DBA Symposium

Yesterday I attended the third version of the Planboard DBA Symposium. Ten presentations were given in two parallel tracks. Some presentations were a little too "hardcore DBA" for me as a simple developer, but still there were several ones I really liked. My highlights were Toon's presentation "APEX for DBA's" and Harald's presentation about SQL Plan Management. Both succeeded in making their subject seem perfectly simple. A sign that the presentations were well delivered.

Toon Koppelaars managed to give some great insights about when processes are executed during navigation in APEX. And his demo contained a nice example of how to have checkboxes in front of your rows and have your code only process the checked ones. I love APEX for its power and simplicity, but Toon's presentation also made it very clear that APEX is lacking a solid Concepts Manual. Let's hope Oracle picks up this signal before introducing yet another great GUI feature.

Harald van Breederode presented SQL Plan Management by first explaining several predecessors, like outlines and SQL Profiles and used some great SQL*Plus demos to show how SQL Plan Management works and a very nice one showing that even the Rule Based Optimizer is not always predictable. A great use for SQL Plan Management is when upgrading your database. Set the OPTIMIZER_FEATURE_ENABLE parameter to the old version, capture the plans into the SQL Management Base and then switch the parameter to the new version. Now you have the possibility to only evolve plans that are equal or better than the old plans. If a scenario like this would have been possible when my current client upgraded from 9 to 10, then the upgrade project would have been WAY shorter and cheaper ...

The symposium was very well organized. And the location was perfect too: VX Company in Baarn has a nice building with some great rooms for presentations. I sure hope I will be visiting this symposium, or its developer related one, again in the future.

My own presentation and the accompanying scripts can be downloaded below. It is in Dutch, although I think you'll be able to understand most of it, even when you don't know the language.

Powerpoint-presentatie Alles Over Groeperen

Bijbehorende demonstratiescripts