Saturday, August 20, 2011

Oracle Real World Performance Day

I've just got back from attending the InSync11 Oracle Real World Performance Day held in Sydney, Australia.

Absolutely inspiring day, with 3 renowned Oracle performance experts in Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth & Graham Wood sharing the stage the entire day, giving their insights from the developer, dba and system architect perspectives.

The format was very conversational, with a discussion about the principles behind a topic, examples the presenters have encountered and then demonstrations of how changing values or coding approaches impacts performance. There is nothing quite like seeing a live demonstration of row by row processing compared with set based processing, or how setting open_cursors too high can bring down performance.

Materials from the presentations are available:

The day started with a data warehouse story of an ETL performance issue, with the networking team, dba and BI teams in a room, each saying their piece of the puzzle was fine; the database was idling, network was performing fine and the ETL process hadn't changed, but overall performance had recently degraded...

Deja vu, at this point a DBA colleague from work and I looked across at each other - we had been it this exact position a few months earlier. The discussion from the experts around this was insightful; if only they had been present when we were tearing our hair out trying to solve the issue.

The day only got better from there on. Tom even mentioned the APEX 4.0 and Library Cache Latch Contention issue in Oracle DB 11.2.0.2.

If you get the opportunity to attend a Real World Performance Day as they tour the globe, I highly recommend it.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

APEX 4.1: Not happy, Jan!

"Not happy, Jan!" is a line from a popular TV advertisement that entered the Australian vernacular.
The advertisement showed a manager expressing her displeasure towards the fleeing figure of one of her staff, as she ran having neglected to book an ad in the upcoming year's Yellow Pages.

While I'm looking forward to using the new APEX 4.1 release and welcome the many new features available, my "Not happy, Jan!" moment came when the recently upgraded apex.oracle.com website broke my application navigation.

For a number of years, I've been using hierarchical list templates to output JSON rather than HTML. This has been very useful allowing me to generate data for a JavaScript tree component using the APEX builtin conditional list entries and authorization to control displaying tree nodes.


Changed functionality now means that the "Between Sub List Items" template attribute is not output unless the corresponding "Sub List Template" attribute contains a "</li>" tag.

Why is this necessary?
I guess its to do with changed functionality to support dynamic SQL lists or mobile themes, but couldn't the developer just leave the template field blank for some templates?

Its possible to code around the issue using plugin functionality, but for now my site is broken until I update it.

I think the APEX team are terrific and do a really great job, but perhaps they got this one wrong.