Author: jim.czuprynski

At last, it is official: It will be my great honor to participate in Oracle Technology Network’s first-ever tour of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) starting this coming Monday, May 25th in Bizerte, Tunisia.

I’ll be speaking on five topics related to Oracle 12c Database – a reprise of the four presentations I did at IOUG COLLABORATE14 #C14LV in Las Vegas this past April 2014, as well as a brand-new presentation on how to leverage Oracle 12c’s two new histograms for even more efficient query execution when there are dramatically skewed data sources to be tackled.

The OTN MENA Tour will cross two continents – Africa and Asia – as we traverse most of North Africa and the near Middle East:

• May 25: Bizerte, Tunisia
• May 26: Beha, Tunisia                        
• May 29: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia        
• May 31: Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
• June 1: Dubai, UAE

My travelling mates include several Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors from across the USA, South America, Asia, and of course MENA as well. To see full details of all the speakers and topics we’ll be covering, please be sure to peruse the Tour’s website.

If you have colleagues in the MENA area, be sure to let them know about the OTN Tour, as I’d love to make their personal acquaintance. I’ll report back as often as I can during the tour via Twitter (hashtag: ##OTNMENATOUR14) and LinkedIn.

And until I meet you all in person, my new MENA colleagues: As-salāmu `alaykum.

The OUG Norway 2014 Varseminar concluded this past April 5th as the crowd of 350 motivated Oracle professionals disembarked from the MS Color Magic. The two-day cruise between Oslo, Norway and Kiel, Germany offered me a chance to regain my “sea legs,” reconnect with my European colleagues, and transfer additional knowledge on the state of Oracle 12c “across the pond.”

This was my second time at OUGN in two years, and this year’s speakers were all excellent, including a unique keynote from Kellyn Pot’Vin and Tim Gorman on how IT professionals often make the wrong assumptions as we chase “tinsel monkeys” down rabbit holes when we’re trying to solve performance problems. I thoroughly enjoyed rendering my two presentations on Oracle 12c Database’s ILM features. Eight separate tracks made for more intimate venues for each presentation, but everyone who participated was enthusiastic about finding out how to best leverage these new capabilities.

Between our flights home, my colleague and friend Luis Campos and I also explored Oslo’s residential district and visited Frogner Park, a huge open space that’s home to some of the most unique sculpture gardens in the midst of one of the most beautiful capitals in Europe.  The brisk April air barely penetrated my new Oracle ACE Director windbreaker – which needed a good break-in anyway. No wonder Norwegians always seem so happy!

My latest Oracle 12c article on is now available in print as well as the IOUG SELECT Journal website: It’s all about those pesky frequency distributions that the Oracle optimizer can use to make extremely short work of skewed data.

And if you haven’t seen my ongoing 12c Database features series at IOUG SELECT, my able colleagues at IOUG have permitted me to place PDF copies of my articles on my blog site so that you can all ramp up your Oracle 12c skills. You can find these articles from previous IOUG SELECT Journal editions on this blog’s new Articles page.

Please be sure to check out these new articles – they may just provide enough ammunition for explaining exactly why now is a great time for your organization to consider the efiicacy and efficiency of Oracle 12c when compared to your current Oracle database release.

Just in time for the OUGN Varseminar 2014 and IOUG COLLABORATE14, I’ve learned that Oracle Corporation has awarded me the status of Oracle ACE Director. I’m extremely humbled and honored to receive this acknowledgment of my passion for all things Oracle Database, and I look forward to participating in the ACE Director program to the fullest possible extent of my abilities.

You can now view the on-demand session from my February 4, 2014 presentation on Oracle 12c Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) features, thanks to my most excellent colleagues at the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). (Many of the folks that attended the live presentation encountered severe difficulty traversing the whole presentation after the 5-minute mark. I apologize once again for the issues, but they are now repaired.)

In my presentation I showed exactly how simple it is to implement ADO in Oracle 12c, including some actual code samples of using ADO for both non-partitioned and partitioned tables, and the resulting potential performance improvement for queries.

Here’s a link to the OTN registration page for this event:

http://pub.vitrue.com/RZRw

As the last day of November wanes and the shadows of winter grow long upon our beautiful snow-covered lake here in Wisconsin, my thoughts naturally turn to the upcoming New Year and what it’s bringing: some excellent opportunities to spread the word on Oracle Database 12c‘s latest elegant, powerful features.

For the first time in my Oracle evangelizing career, I’m honored and humbled to have been selected to present at Hotsos Symposium 2014 on March 3 – 5, 2014 in Irving, TX. My topic, How Hot Is My Data? Leveraging Automatic Database Optimization (ADO) Features in Oracle 12c Database For Dramatic Performance Improvements, will focus on new Oracle 12c features that make it possible to migrate data dynamically and automatically from one level of storage and compression to another as data gets “colder” over time. I’ll be demonstrating how 12c uses heat maps and data optimization policies to make the most of Tier 0, 1, and 2 level storage, Advanced Compression, and Hybrid Columnar Compression.

I’m also happy to report that I’ll be at IOUG’s COLLABORATE14 conference on April 7-11, 2014 in Las Vegas, NV. I’ve got three main topics I’ll be presenting:

• Session 185 will be a reprise of my Hotsos Symposium 2014 presentation on Automatic Database Optimization (ADO) features in Oracle 12c.
• Session 186 is titled Blink and You’ll Miss It: Migrating, Cloning and Recovering Oracle 12c Databases At Warp Speed. Among other topics, I’ll be discussing and demonstrating several new methods for migrating pre-12c databases to Oracle 12c, cloning 12c‘s new Pluggable Databases (PDBs) at blinding speed, and how Recovery Manager makes it possible for uber-fast backups with 12c‘s support of multi-piece backups for datafile image copies.
• Session 187, Something Old, Something New: Leveraging Oracle 12c’s Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Features for Improved Database Performance, will look at two revolutionary new features in 12c, In-Database Archiving (IDA) and Temporal Validity (TV), that will now make it possible to store multiple versions of the same row within a segment separated only by time.

 As usual, there will be a cornucopia of other top-notch speakers at both Hotsos Symposium 2014 and COLLABORATE14, including Tom Kyte, Maria Colgan, Bryn Llewellyn, Cary Milsap, Kerry Osborne, and many other rising stars in the Oracle knowledge universe. I hope you can make the time and commitment to increase your technical know-how of all things Oracle at one or more of these conferences … because that’s why I attend them as well. I look forward to seeing you there!

My colleagues at Confio have just published my first article in a three-part series on the myriad new features of Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12cR1) via Confio’s venerable portal, LogicalRead.

This first article focuses on some of the new security features in Oracle 12cR1, including:

• The new system privileges specific to RMAN backups, TDE, and Data Guard administration
• The new options for recreating a database’s password file to accommodate these new system privileges
• The capability to identify excessively powerful system and object privileges that might have been GRANTed by mistake … even those which have never been used

This new article series also includes code samples on how to leverage these new features immediately in an Oracle 12cR1 environment. Please be sure to take a peek at peek at this information – it may just revolutionize the way you’ve been using the SYSDBA role in your day-to-day Oracle database administration activities.

Larry Ellison always has something interesting to say during his first keynote of Oracle OpenWorld, and OOW 2013 has been no exception. Larry talked about a new feature for Oracle Database 12c – the in-memory database option – that’s going to allow simultaneous row-level storage (just like we’ve always stored data) and column-level storage (essentially as an in-memory object structure) which will … wait for it! … make the need for non-selective, non-PK indexes irrelevant.

This new feature will be quite simple to implement; all we’ll need to do is

• Set a new initialization parameter (inmemory_size) to an appropriate size
• Identify the tables that we want to leverage IMDO
• Remove any non-selective indexes
• Step back and watch the performance for all queries for those tables increase dramatically

During a live demo on Sunday, Larry remarked this new feature can offer well over 100x query performance improvements; in fact, the demonstrated query performance improvement actually peaked at 1390x for several billion rows queried.

As an Oracle DBA, I am pumped to try this feature out, as I’ve got several clients who can leverage this option immediately, and it offers a compelling reason to consider upgrading to 12c as soon as possible. I talked with several Oracle representatives at the Exhibitor’s Hall yesterday and they told me that IMDO (that’s my acronym for now) will be available in Oracle Database release 12.1.0.2. I’ll keep you posted on IMDO in future posts.

First off, if you attended my presentation this morning at 08:00 AM PDT in San Francisco: thanks very much! We had a great turnout of over 300 people with a bit of SRO in the back of the room, even for a Sunday right after the chaos of everyone attempting to register at OOW 2013 just a few moments earlier.

Several of you asked me if my presentation was available for review. Since I’m not sure if it will be available until OOW 2013 concludes, I’ve posted it here on my Presentations page. Please take a look and don’t be shy if you have questions – send me an e-mail and I’ll do the very best I can to answer them.

If you’re still at OOW 2013, have a great conference and safe travels to wherever home is for you.

After what seems an interminable wait, Oracle Database 12c Release 1 has finally been approved for general availability. I’ve been presenting on, experimenting with, and writing about 12c topics for the past several weeks and months and I’m pleasantly surprised with what I’ve found so far, especially the new Container Database (CDBs) and Pluggable Database (PDB) features.

I’ve also been working with my able colleague and good friend Anuj Mohan to build and promote the IOUG Oracle Database 12c Special Interest Group (SIG) on LinkedIn. Anuj and I will be posting new topics every week or so on that LinkedIn SIG, so please be sure to stay tuned to that SIG for new topics. We’ve already reached nearly 100 members, but we’re looking for contributions and discussions as we continue to explore Oracle Database 12c’s rich new feature sets.

Finally, I recently found out that I’ll be one of the lead-off hitters at the IOUG Sunday session extravaganza at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 on September 23, 2013. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my COLLABORATE13 session on my exploration of Oracle Database 12c’s most useful new features. If you’d like to get a taste of that presentation before OOW, we’ll be presenting it as an IOUG webinar at 13:00 CDT on Wednesday, August 28th. You can sign up for this webinar here.

Happy computing! and I hope to meet you virtually at the upcoming webinar, or in person at OOW2013.