Dominic Giles drew our attention to the safe harbour statement. Anything can change between now and when the new version is released.

There has been some confusion about the announcements regarding autonomous database. This is a service on top of oracle 18c. Oracle 18c is a product.

Release Schedule

Oracle will change its release process to release annually. Hopefully this will lead to more stable releases, as there won’t be a rush to get the new features into the current version of the database. Changes will be incremental, but will happen every year. There will be quarterly release updates. These will go back to using a number rather than a date format, These will include all fixes, not just security fixes, but performance changes will be switched off by default.

The first session after lunch was Oracle Database 12c Release 2 - What is new in the Oracle Optimiser. It was taken by Nigel Baylis who is the product manager for the oracle optimiser.

I was impressed by Nigel’s honesty when he talked about what worked, what didn’t and how things are being changed to correct the mistakes of the past. This is the main reason to come to user groups of course. It made me feel like Oracle are willing to accept where things haven’t worked out as they hoped, and take action to correct it.

For the last session before lunch I listened to Richard Foote talking about new index features in 12.2. Richard is well known as the Oracle Indexing expert, and so I was eager to hear what he had to say.

Object name length

Indexes can now have 128 character names, where before they could only be 30 characters. I expect this will make life easier where naming standards dictate long names for whatever reason.

The presenter was Pete Finnigan.

Pete talked through a solution (PFCATK) he had developed for auditing the oracle database. This appears to be currently in development and not available for general use. He seemed inclined to release the core tool and sell a pretty front end or consultancy, but it seemed he hadn’t yet decided. The lack of anything to play with (Unless you ask for a copy of the tool and agree to install it and give feedback) made this session less interesting than it might otherwise be.

This is second session I attended in Tech 17. It was presented by Martin Bach and David Kurtz. The answer is eDB360. The session was in two parts with a presentation by Martin, then a demo with David.

Martin discussed the problems of doing a database health check, particularly for a third party company who may not actually have access to the database. It needs a standard approach, which is consistent across databases, and repeatable. Ideally performance data in AWR should be persisted for just over a year so that the performance of annual business cycles can be compared e.g., year end for financial systems.

On Wednesday 5th December, I attended Tech 17. While it is a pain to organise getting there and back, I found in previous years that it was useful for me to go and find out what is happening in the industry.

Cost Based Optimisation - The Panel Session

Panelists:

• Jonathan Lewis
• Christian Antognini
• Richard Foote
• Nigel Bayliss
• Maria Colgan

Slow Start

This took questions from the internet and the audience, so it is a bit variable. The question has to match something the panel can talk about. The first questions about the Autonomous database was disappointing in this regard as very little information has been released about it, and the Oracle employees had to stick to the company line, so couldn’t speculate.

The October Critical patch saw Oracle release

Patch 26743107: PT 8.55.19 PRODUCT PATCH LINUX DPK.

This is important to install because there was a serious security vulnerability in the performance monitor component which was easily exploitable over the network without authorisation.

However, once the DPK was installed, looking at the Weblogic home, we can see that the October critical patch

Patch 26519417: WLS PATCH SET UPDATE 12.1.3.0.171017

hasn’t been applied. It would be nice if it was delivered fully patched, but presumably Oracle’s internal time scales don’t allow this, so I will have to patch it myself.

Here is another note to myself about how to look at what sessions were doing over time.

The situation was that we saw a lot of blocking sessions during a performance test. The developer wants information about the blocking sessions. To do this we want historical information from v$session, which helpfully tells us the blocking session, and also the SQL being run. This can be sampled every so often using a simple script, but Oracle have already thought about this and created v$active_session_history which you can use if you have licensed the Diagnostics pack.