A Brief Brief about a Brief KScope13 Visit...

Due to some unforeseen circumstances I was unable to spend as much time as I would have liked at KScope13 in New Orleans but boy did I pack a lot into the 24 hours that I was there.

First of all I want to thank ODTUG and selection committee for allowing me to present (in the noob track!) and for putting on a top notch conference. The OTDUG group is detail oriented and I can appreciate that. Attendees had little to worry about except how to be 2 or 3 places at once to absorb all of the great content included in the schedule. I also liked the mobile app they provided a lot, it had abstracts, a schedule builder, maps, and access to the presentations. Much better than shuffling paper!

My presentation went well. I only had a few "like such as The Iraq" moments although I will probably cringe when I hear the ODTUG recording of the session. I only ran over about 3 minutes and got lots of great questions and feedback after we finished. I will post again when ODTUG makes the presentation available.

Some highlights:

  • Thanks to John Scott from Apex Evangelists for his availability for some last minute fact checking. Also thanks to Roel for helping me get my bearings before and after the presentation.
  • Martin D'Souza stopped by to introduce himself. "Hi I'm Martin" dude I know who you are! Anyway, looking forward to wrapping up some of my most used visualizations into an Apex Plug-in. First up will be a hierarchical b-tree view of some type with some zoom capability. Digging into Martin's Apress book on Apex Plugins now.
  • Kyle Hailey also introduced himself and jetted to his session as he was tapped to fill in for a last minute open session. More on this informative session later...
  • Some great questions from the audience during and after the session.
  • I heard Leighton showed off my Archive Redo Log Heat Map in his SQL Developer for DBAs presentation. I was unable to attend but heard he duped a pluggable database in 12c during that session too… which was available just a few hours before his presentation. EPIC!
  • Source Code for that visualization got retweeted by Cary Millsap so I'm definitely geek-starstruck.

Slides are available here: link .

Some notable presentations I attended:

Bye Bye Connect By
I timed the arrival from the airport just so I could see Dominick Delmolino's "Bye Bye Connect By" and was glad I did. The project I am currently working on makes heavy use of hierarchical relationships. I am starting to get into more and more CONNECT BY queries. Dominick presented many examples of how the new Recursive SQL syntax is different and better than CONNECT BY. Particularly good were the intra-session discussions that came about… I found out that CONNECT BY has a nasty habit of bottoming out and failing in certain situations. I'm going to investigate the new syntax and try some head-to-head performance comparisons in an upcoming blog post.

SQL Tuning for Developers
Kyle Hailey's SQL Tuning for Developers was great. He demonstrated a visual method for determining the best join order. I had read about this method before but it didn't gel until I saw Kyle's slides which really spell out each step and factors that go into determining the next step.

Kyle and 1 other person are the only folks I have ever heard talk about Dan Tow's "SQL Tuning" OReilly book. It is really one of the seminal works in SQL Tuning and I wholeheartedly recommend it to beginning and veteran tuners.

But regardless, if you ever get a chance to hear Kyle speak, do it. He knows his stuff and is good at relating it to his audiences.

-Dave

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