Monthly Archives: September 2010

Sangam 10

It has been almost an year since i posted something (useful) here. The last post was also a crappy one 🙂 . Well, it all boils down to sheer laziness 😉 . Now, i think the time has come to be regular again. Here i am getting a good start talking about Sangam10, i attended last week. It was a great opportunity to meet so many fellow Oracle professionals and most awesomely to meet & see Jonathan Lewis talk about Performance & Tuning. As expected the whole experience was amazing. It was a 2 day event where Jonathan was delivering 2 half day seminars on SQL Tuning and there were other break out sessions as well. We had planned to go a day in advance so me, Aman, Ankit & Neeraj reached Hyderabad on 2nd Sep.

Jonathan’s presentations were simply amazing. His knowledge about how things work (and why they work this way not that) is simply awesome.  He is an inspiration for newbies like us and there was so much to learn from him. Few of the quick tips that i picked up from him:

  1. Don’t believe what you read or hear. Make small test cases to test and confirm how things work & how they don’t. He said that he has around 2000 test cases on his laptop. Some of them ready to be fired on Oracle database 12g 😉 .
  2. Always document your findings. At a later date you only won’t be able to remember that something that you already faced and solved something you are stuck in. If you document things properly, you would always remember a bit of it and you can search it in a minute.

Also i got to meet & attend presentation of good friend Francisco Munoz Alvarez. I have been in touch with him since more than 2 years but this was for the first time i was meeting him in person. Also his presentation on how to become a good DBA was really awesome. Enjoyed every bit of it.

Two of my colleagues Vivek Sharma and Rahul Dutta were also presenting, so got a chance to see their presentations too. Vivek talked about developing scalable applications and Rahul’s presentation was about developing a EBS reporting solution using Oracle streams.

I attended some part of Mark Rittman‘s session also. I am not much into data warehousing but Mark is such a respected name so wanted to be present in his session 😉 .

I also met and attended one of the presentation of Iggy Fernandez. He talked about 52 weeks in the life of a database. I couldn’t attend his other presentation on reading execution plans as Vivek was presnting in the same time slot.

Overall, it was an amazing experience and i am already looking forward to attending Sangam (or whatever it would be called 😉 ) 11 !

Read Aman’s post about Sangam 10.