Last week I attended a four day seminar held by Jože Senegačnik. The first three days covered theoretical part and if you plan to attend the course be prepared for a hefty amount of information (720+ slides). Considering the amount of material and in-depth knowledge of Jože about Oracle performance tuning and internals, I’m positive you’ll learn something new, no matter how experienced you’re (or you might think you’re;-).
The fourth day was reserved for practical workshop. Jože prepared a test Oracle XE database instance for each participant with sample database and PL/SQL package that we needed to tune during the day. Test scenario resembled TPC-C benchmark.
Since the elapsed time could vary from PC to PC due to the different HW configuration, he told us that we should concentrate on logical I/O (LIO), so we all started with approx. 1,1 million LIO per execution of PL/SQL package, with the goal to lower the LIO under 300K (which we did at the end of the day). And here comes a shameless advert for a profiler from my side. Instead of using tkprof for a trace file analysis we used profiler.
Jože is developing and enhancing his proprietary trace file analyzer called profiler since 2002. This is a command line tool written in C that runs on Windows (I’m not sure about Unix/Linux ports) that can be used instead of tkprof. Output is a html file with correct sql hierarchy and all the necessary statistics and timings. Profiler can be purchased by course attendees for 600€ (a fair offer if you ask me, considering the amount of work put in the development of this tool by Jože). Hopefully, I’ll publish some screenshots as soon as I get my copy of the profiler.
Anyway, if you have a chance to attend this course I’m sure you’ll not regret.

I’ll spend next two days in Zagreb attending the 2 day seminar by Craig Shallahamer, titled “Reactive Performance Management Intensive”. I hope Oracle University from Croatia will continue to “hunt” down prominent Oracle speakers and bring them to Zagreb; at least once or twice per year.
I spent this afternoon strolling in the parks and streets of Zagreb enjoying the sunshine, recharging my batteries – (not the batteries for my laptop… for a change ;-).
Anyway, I’ll post a comment to this blog with interesting notes (links) from the seminar that I’ll found useful to share with you. Right now I’m at hotel writing this short blog and preparing for the seminar by reading some papers from OraPub. (For those of you who are not familiar with orapub.com yet, a fair warning, the process of downloading white papers from orapub.com looks a bit awkward at first with it’s “shopping cart” but nevertheless, the papers are free – all that is needed is some patience.)