Upcoming Conferences

At this time of year, I'm usually panicking about my Hotsos presentation/paper and up to my eyeballs in test scripts. I enjoy it and the absence feels a little strange, but I decided to do something different this year.

Although it's the 10th Symposium and I'm sure it will be as educational and fun as ever, I decided not to submit an abstract for a variety of reasons, one of which was the cluster of conferences that occur during the spring. Although the Oracle ACE Director program helps with travel expenses, the rest is self-funded including the time off work so I need to pick and choose my conferences carefully. For years Hotsos, Openworld and the UKOUG were fixtures but that means I've missed out on the wonders of Miracle spring events and the various Scandinavian boat trips!

Of course, almost as soon as I decided I wouldn't be going to Dallas the regret started to set in as there are people who I often only see at Hotsos who I won't be able to catch up with thise year and I think some of my best presentations have been there. It got worse when I looked at the list of confirmed speakers and spotted an old friends name. Sigh, having encouraged Paul Matuszyk to attend the Symposium while we were working together in Scotland he enjoyed attending a few times and decided he wanted to present there one day. Now that he has been accepted, I won't be there to see it (By the way, this reinforces a point I've made to several people. Although you will see a lot of familiar faces presenting, there's always been space for new presenters as far as I'm aware. Mark Rittman is another 'new' speaker there this year.)

However, now that the decision's been made, I need to let it go and move on to those conferences I hope to attend instead.

I had a terrific time at the OUGN (Norwegian User Group) spring conference on the boat last year so I was delighted when they invited me back to speak at this year's event.

My presentations there will be an existing one from OOW and UKOUG and a new one ...

---

Performance and Stability with Oracle 11g SQL Plan Management

This presentation discusses the use of Oracle 11g SQL Plan Management to safely upgrade a complex and critical Data Warehouse system, ensuring stable performance whilst taking full advantage of optimizer improvements in Oracle Database 11gR2.

Subjects covered include -

• SQL Plan Management fundamentals
• Controlling execution plan evolution
• Using SQL Plan Management to resolve complex performance challenges
• The interaction between bind variables, histograms, Adaptive Cursor Sharing and SQL Plan Management.

The presentation will focus on real world experiences of both the strengths and limitations of SPM.

Falling in love all over again - OEM 12c Performance Page Enhancements
Oracle RDBMS 10g introduced significant instrumentation enhancements and the OEM 10g pages illustrated them to make performance analysis much easier. OEM 12c is the latest evolutionary stage of the Performance Pages and this
presentation shows the new features that make them even more compelling and useful in more situations.

---

I'm also hoping to attend Miracle Openworld because it's a long time since I was in Denmark and I realised last year just how much I've missed this conference. I submitted the Statistics on Partitioned Objects abstract because I think it would be good for that particular conference and because it's still what I'm spending most of my time on in the office at the moment. Having said that, I haven't heard anything back yet and it looks like the agenda already has some pretty interesting presentations on there, so I might not make the cut this time.

Still tempted to go, though