This is an excellent conference held yearly in Denver, a relatively short trip for me but well worth traveling to if you’re so inclined. While listening to another facinating talk by Jonathan Lewis today called “Single Table Access Paths” he shared a sidebar thought that seemed worth passing on. The talk essentially described various methods [...]

Happy Valentines Day!
Many DBAs are aware that the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) including Active Session History (ASH) is only available to users licensed for Enterprise Edition with the Diagnostic Pack.  This is invaluable data for conducting performance tuning based on recent historical data but off limits unless you are properly licensed.  Those 10g users who [...]

Why databases aren’t really fast

When most Oracle databases are inspected to see exactly what they are doing, most often it is disk I/O access. Databases read and write a lot of data, and because magnetic drive technology is slow, often the database spends a majority of its time waiting for disk read/write requests to complete.

How [...]