Oaktable World past years
Oaktable World 2014
Agenda for Oaktable World 2014, located at Creativity Museum, is
(also on Tues 10am-5pm hands on labs with Delphix, DBvisit, Confio)
time | Monday Sept 29 | Tuesday Sept 30 |
8 | (8:30 am) Mogens: welcome | Carlos Sierra: introducing edb360 tool slides & video |
9 | Riyaj Shamsudeen: in-memory internals slides & blog post | Kent Graziano: Worst Practices in DW Design slides & video |
10 | Chris Antognini: Indexes: Structure, Splits and Free Space Management Internals video & slides | Tanel Poder: Hacking Oracle 12c video |
11 | Martin Bach: A deep dive into HCC internals and mechanics video | Jeremiah Wilton: Oracle on EC2: You’re doing it wrong video |
12 | ted talks | ted talks |
1 | Jonathan Lewis:Calculating Selectivity slides & video | Connor McDonald: clone db slides |
2 | Greg Rahn: The Current State of SQL + Hadoop video | Frits Hoogland: Profiling the logwriter and database writer (with version 12.1.0.2 update) slides & video |
3 | Kevin Closson:SLOB – For More Than I/O! slides & video | Alex Gorbachev: Anomaly detection on performance data video |
4 | Toon: Why DBMS’s Still Lack SQL Assertions Support (A polite excuse) slides & Video | Karl Arao: Capacity Planning: SLAs, KPIs, Headroom, Expiry Date |
Ted Talks between noon and 1pm
Monday | Tuesday |
Eric Grancher: using ASH to understand IO issues slides and screen capture & video | Jonah Harris: network protocal hacking making Oracle talk with MySQL video |
Jonathan Lewis: Breaking Exadata slides & video | Jonathan Lewis:Parallel Execution Plans slides |
Jonathan Gennick: Seven Secrets in Publishing video | Kent Graziano: Data Vault 2.0: using MD5 hash for change detection |
Cary Millsap – The most important “trick” of performance instrumentation slides & video | Alex Gorbachev: 100Miles video |
Kerry Osborne: How to Hire World Class Oracle Dudes and Dudettes video |
Oaktable World 2013
Monday Sept 23 and Tuesday Sept 24 in San Francisco
The secret conference-within-a-conference formerly known as Oracle ClosedWorld which used to be held at the same time as Oracle OpenWorld has outgrown its roots and is now an open conference rebranded as OakTable World. This is your exclusive invitation to mind-meld with the illustrious members of the OakTable Network while enjoying the free-flowing hospitality of the generous sponsors Pythian, and Delphix and others. You don’t have to be an attendee at Oracle OracleWorld in order to attend OakTable World.
Monday September 23
8:45 – 8:55 Welcome by Mogens Nørgaard
community lab (50 ) | imagination lab (100) | |||
50 minute talks | speaker | topic | speaker | topic |
9 am | Iggy Fernandez | Amazon vs Ebay: NoSQL vs Oracle | Tim Gorman | 3 Types of Table Compression |
10 am | Women in Tech | roundtable (Kellyn Pot’vin) | Fabian Pascal | Missing Data and the Relational Model: The Last NULL in the Coffin |
11 am | Gwen Shapira | ETL on Hadoop | Riyaj Shamsudeen | Hacking RAC with truss, strace, pmap, pstack,wireshark, etc |
Noon (5-30 min talks) | Paul WrightArup Nanda | 12c security“Building a System for Users and Privileges with an Expiration Date” | Mogens Nørgaard | Keynote |
1 pm | Kent Graziano | Agile Data Warehouse Modeling: Data Vault Data Modeling | Chris Antognini | Row Chaining and Row Migration Internals: Differences and Consequences, Detecting and Avoiding |
2 pm | Mark W. Farnham | misc. dirty tricks | Adam Leventhal | Cross Platform Cloning |
3 pm | John Beresniewicz | Average Active Sessions | Jonathan Lewis | How Delphix Works |
4 pm | Eric Grancher | IO latency outliers | DevOps | roundtable (Kyle Hailey) |
Monday, September 23
- 6pm-8pm
- Southside Spirit House, 575 Howard St.
- Join IOUG at Southside Spirit House for cocktails, food and your chance to win prizes! See what being part of the IOUG community is all about!
Tuesday September 24
community lab (50 ) | imagination lab (100) | |||
speaker | topic | speaker | topic | |
9 am | Doug Burns | 10053 trace | Christo Kutrovsky | Oracle, Memory & Linux |
10 am | Carlos Sierra | Using Adaptive Cursor Sharing (ACS) to produce multiple Optimal Plans | Jonathan Lewis | 12c Histograms and Approximate NDV |
11 am | Marco Gralike | Wikipedia XML handling | Greg Rahn | SQL on Hadoop |
Noon (5-30 min talks) | Morten Egan | Disco computing | Mogens Nørgaard | licensing |
1 pm | Paul Vallee | Securing Data in Snowden Age | Tanel Poder | Hacking Oracle DB |
2 pm | Frits Hoogland | gdb debugger | Kerry Osborne | SQL Plan Management in Oracle Database 12c |
3 pm | Women in Tech | roundtable (Kellyn Pot’vin) | Cary Millsap | The Perils of Describing Performance Improvements |
4 pm | Karl Arao | Ultimate Exadata IO monitoring – Flash, HardDisk , & Write back cache overhead | Alex Gorbachev | Machine Learning with Oracle Database |
Mogens Norgaard
http://wedonotuse.blogspot.com/
Jonathan Lewis
Jonathan Lewis is a well-known figure in the Oracle world with more than 24 years experience using the software. He has published three books about Oracle, the most recent of which was published in Nov 2011, and contributed to three others. He runs a couple of websites and contributes fairly regularly to newsgroups, forums, and User Group magazines and events around the world. http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/all-postings/
Jonathan has been self-employed for most of his time in the IT industry. For the last eighteen years, he has specialized in short-term assignments, typically of a design, review, or trouble-shooting nature – often spending no more than two or three days on a client site to address problems. He runs seminars about using Oracle all over the world and has visited 50 different countries (and a dozen states in the USA) to talk about, or trouble-shoot, Oracle systems.
Tanel Poder
Tanel Poder is an experienced consultant with deep expertise in Oracle database internals, advanced performance tuning and end-to-end troubleshooting. He specializes in solving complex problems spanning multiple infrastructure layers such as UNIX, Oracle, networks, storage and recently the whole Exadata hardware/software stack.
Tanel is one of the first Oracle Certified Masters in the world, passing the OCM DBA exam in 2002. He is also an Oracle ACE Director and a proud member of the OakTable Network. In addition to consulting and delivering seminars worldwide, Tanel also publishes troubleshooting tools and technical articles at his website http://tech.e2sn.com and blog http://blog.tanelpoder.com
Kyle Hailey
Currently working with industry leading software, kernel and filesystem designers at Delphix to take corporate data management to a new level of agility. Kyle is a principal designer for the Oracle Enterprise Manager performance pages. He is a member of Oracle Oak Table, the co-author of Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table, and was a technical editor of Oracle Wait Interface. He holds a patent in the area of database performance diagnosis, and has been a speaker at Hotsos, NOCOUG, RMOUG, NYCOUG, Oracle World and DB Forum. Kyle also teaches classes around the world on Oracle performance tuning. http://kylehailey.com Oracle ACE
Cary Millsap
Cary Millsap is an entrepreneur, software technology advisor, software developer, and Oracle software performance specialist. His technical papers are quoted in many Oracle books, in Wikipedia, in blogs all over the world, and in dozens of conference presentations each month. His blog is read by thousands of people each month. He has presented at hundreds of public and private events around the world. He wrote the book “Optimizing Oracle Performance” (O’Reilly 2003), for which he and co-author Jeff Holt were named Oracle Magazine’s 2004 Authors of the Year. He is the founder and president of Method R Corporation (http://method-r.com), a company that creates frustration-free software that shows performance the way you’ve always wanted to see it.
Cary is an Oracle Ace Director.
Tim Gorman
Tim Gorman has worked in IT with relational databases since 1984, as an Oracle PRO*C and PL/SQL application developer since 1990, as an Oracle DBA since 1993, and managing/designing very large data warehouses on Oracle since 1994. He is an independent consultant (www.EvDBT.com) specializing in data warehousing and database administration (particularly performance and availability). Mr Gorman is currently president of the Rocky Mtn Oracle Users Group (www.RMOUG.org) where he has been a member since 1993 and a board member since 1995, has co-authored five books (three with the Oak Table Press), performed technical review on eight more books, has been an Oracle ACE since 2007 and an Oracle ACE Director since 2012, a member of the Oak Table Network since 2002, and has presented at Oracle Open World, Collaborate, Kaleidoscope, Hotsos, and local Oracle users groups in lots of wonderful places around the world. http://www.EvDBT.com
Greg Rahn
Greg Rahn is a Solutions Architect in the Partner Engineering group at Cloudera. He focuses on helping Cloudera’s hardware partners optimize their platforms for Hadoop. In addition, he works on performance engineering and benchmarking for the Impala project. Before joining Cloudera, Greg worked for eight years as a database performance engineer at Oracle in the esteemed Real-World Performance Group in the Server Technologies organization.
Twitter: @GregRahn
Alex Gorbachev
Few DBAs are as well equipped as Alex to handle any kind of database scenario. Alex has architected and designed numerous successful database solutions addressing challenging business requirements. Alex is a respected figure in the Oracle world and a sought-after leader and speaker at Oracle conferences around the globe. He regularly publishes articles on the Pythian blog and runs online webinars. Alex is a member of OakTable Network and an Oracle ACE Director.
Today, Alex is working at The Pythian Group. He started at Pythian in Ottawa, leading a team of database experts before moving to Australia to embrace the challenges of setting up company business in the East Asia/Pacific region. Now he’s back in Ottawa as Pythian’s Chief Technology Officer, continuing to bridge the gap between business and technology. The search for the perfect fit between technology, engineering talents and business processes is what keeps him up at night.
Before joining Pythian, Alex developed and administered Oracle databases and applications for Lukoil, the Russian petrochemicals giant. Later, he led design and implementation of high-availability mission-critical databases for Amadeus in Germany, the leading Global Distribution System and biggest processor of travel bookings in the world.
Alex is an Oracle Ace Director.
Gwen Shapira
Gwen Shapira is a Senior Oracle DBA at Pythian, and the company’s newest Oracle ACE. Gwen Shapira studied computer science, statistics, and operations research at the University of Tel Aviv, and then went on to spend the next ten years in different technical positions in the IT industry.
Gwen is an OakTable member, Oracle ACE and Oracle Certified Professional. She specializes in scalability and high-availability solutions such as RAC and Streams, and has presented at various conferences including Hotsos Symposium 2009 and RMOUG 2010. Gwen Shapira also maintains a popular Oracle related blog: http://prodlife.wordpress.com.
Christian Antognini
Since 1995, Christian Antognini has focused on understanding how the Oracle database engine works. His main interests include logical and physical database design, the integration of databases with Java applications, the query optimizer and basically everything else related to application performance management and optimization. He is currently working as a senior principal consultant and trainer at Trivadis in Zürich, Switzerland.
If Christian is not helping one of his customers get the most out of Oracle, he is somewhere lecturing on application performance management or new Oracle Database features for developers. In addition to classes and seminars organized by Trivadis, he regularly presents at conferences and user-group meetings. He is a proud member of the OakTable Network.
Christian is the author of the book Troubleshooting Oracle Performance (Apress, 2008).
Karl Arao
Kristofferson “Karl” Arao is a Senior Technical Consultant at Enkitec.
Some of his experiences as a DBA include Proactive database maintenance, Database Installation and Configuration for High Availability and Disaster Recovery, Migration and Upgrades, Backup and Recovery, Database Hardening, Capacity Planning, and Performance Tuning. He shares his experiences, adventures, and discoveries in his Blog (karlarao.wordpress.com) and owns a Wiki site (karlarao.tiddlyspot.com) where he shares his quick guides and documentations on technologies.
Karl Arao is an Oracle Ace (bit.ly/karlarao), OCP-DBA, and RHCE. He presents at local Oracle Events and DBA round tables, and has also presented at the recent Oracle Open World Unconference and Oracle Closed World. He is also a proud member of the Philippine Software Industry Association Technology Council.
Kent Graziano

Other speakers
- Eric Grancher (CERN)
- Mark Farnham
- John Beresniewicz (Oracle)
- Kellyn Pot’vin (Enkitec)
- Doug Burns(Bayvale Consulting Services)
- Marco Gralike (AMIS)
- Frits Hoogland (Enkitec)
Oaktable World 2012
Oaktable world (aka Oracle Closed World) was an another amazing conference.

More videos will be posted as we have time to process the footage (help from video editors more than encouraged, email me Kyle.Hailey at delphix.com )
Here are a few photos from this year:
Thanks everyone for an awesome conference.
Special thanks to conferences patrons
- Paul Vallee
- Tim Gorman
- Kerry Osborne
- Marco Gralike
- Jonathan Gennick
- Marcin Przepiorowski
Without their help the conference wouldn’t have been the same.
Thanks to all the speakers
- Jonathan Lewis – Pessimist view of Exadata, video , presentation small, large
- Cary Millsap – Grand Unified Theory of “Tuning”, video
- Kyle Hailey – Database Virtualization and Instant Cloning, video
- Tanel Poder – video: hacker session
- Tim Gorman – Exchange Partition , video
- Karl Arao – Where did my CPU go?
- Christian Antognini – Cursor Sharing , sql queries , video
- Connor McDonald – RAC Upgrade Nightmare , video
- Brendan Gregg – USE Method for Performance Tuning, video
- Alex Gorbachev – ASM failures live (some scripts), video
- Gwen Shapira – Big Disasters
- Kevin Closson – SLOB and what’s it got to do with Exadata , video
- Greg Rahn – Beyond Relational Databases ,video
Oracle “Ted” Talks
- John Hurley – OS Truth, little white lies, and the Oracle Wait Interface
- Doug Burns –
- Paul Vallee – video
- Kerry Osborne – things in other_xml
- Martin Klier – ”The Connectivity Issue” (Server change, DBA and an Oscilloscope)
– Kyle Hailey
http://kylehailey.com
Sponsors:
Mogens Norgaard
http://wedonotuse.blogspot.com/
Jonathan Lewis
Jonathan Lewis is a well-known figure in the Oracle world with more than 24 years experience using the software. He has published three books about Oracle, the most recent of which was published in Nov 2011, and contributed to three others. He runs a couple of websites and contributes fairly regularly to newsgroups, forums, and User Group magazines and events around the world. http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/all-postings/
Jonathan has been self-employed for most of his time in the IT industry. For the last eighteen years, he has specialized in short-term assignments, typically of a design, review, or trouble-shooting nature – often spending no more than two or three days on a client site to address problems. He runs seminars about using Oracle all over the world and has visited 50 different countries (and a dozen states in the USA) to talk about, or trouble-shoot, Oracle systems.
Tanel Poder
Tanel Poder is an experienced consultant with deep expertise in Oracle database internals, advanced performance tuning and end-to-end troubleshooting. He specializes in solving complex problems spanning multiple infrastructure layers such as UNIX, Oracle, networks, storage and recently the whole Exadata hardware/software stack.
Tanel is one of the first Oracle Certified Masters in the world, passing the OCM DBA exam in 2002. He is also an Oracle ACE Director and a proud member of the OakTable Network. In addition to consulting and delivering seminars worldwide, Tanel also publishes troubleshooting tools and technical articles at his website http://tech.e2sn.com and blog http://blog.tanelpoder.com
Kyle Hailey
Currently working with industry leading software, kernel and filesystem designers at Delphix to take corporate data management to a new level of agility. Kyle is a principal designer for the Oracle Enterprise Manager performance pages. He is a member of Oracle Oak Table, the co-author of Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table, and was a technical editor of Oracle Wait Interface. He holds a patent in the area of database performance diagnosis, and has been a speaker at Hotsos, NOCOUG, RMOUG, NYCOUG, Oracle World and DB Forum. Kyle also teaches classes around the world on Oracle performance tuning. http://kylehailey.com
Kevin Closson
Kevin is a Technology Director and Performance Architect in the Data Computing Division of EMC, focused on the Data Computing Appliance, a DW/BI/Big Data Analytics appliance based on the Greenplum Database. Kevin’s 23-year engineering background in Oracle Database concluded in 2011 after a 4 year tenure as Performance Architect in the Exadata development team in Oracle’s Server Technology Group. His work prior to Oracle, at HP/PolyServe, Veritas, and IBM/Sequent, was focused on throughput, scalability, and availability of the Oracle server. Kevin’s Oracle Database port-level work at Sequent lead to his patents in SMP/NUMA locking and database caching technology.
Kevin has collaborated on a number of books and contributed to Oracle Magazine, IBM Redbooks, and the IOUG SELECT Journal. He is a member of the OakTable Network and an Oracle ACE (retd.). Kevin maintains a very popular technology blog atkevinclosson.wordpress.com.
Brendan Gregg
Brendan Gregg is the lead performance engineer at Joyent, where he analyzes performance and scalability for small to large cloud computing environments, at any level of the software stack, down to metal. He is the primary author of “DTrace” (Prentice Hall, 2011), and co-author of “Solaris Performance and Tools” (Prentice Hall, 2006), and well as numerous articles about systems performance. He was previously a performance lead and kernel engineer at Sun Microsystems, and has also been a performance consultant. He developed the DTraceToolkit and the ZFS L2ARC, and many of his DTrace scripts are shipped by default in Mac OS X and Oracle Solaris 11. His recent work has included performance visualizations for illumos and Linux kernel analysis http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/
Cary Millsap
Cary Millsap is an entrepreneur, software technology advisor, software developer, and Oracle software performance specialist. His technical papers are quoted in many Oracle books, in Wikipedia, in blogs all over the world, and in dozens of conference presentations each month. His blog is read by thousands of people each month. He has presented at hundreds of public and private events around the world. He wrote the book “Optimizing Oracle Performance” (O’Reilly 2003), for which he and co-author Jeff Holt were named Oracle Magazine’s 2004 Authors of the Year. He is the founder and president of Method R Corporation (http://method-r.com), a company that creates frustration-free software that shows performance the way you’ve always wanted to see it.
Cary is an Oracle Ace Director.
Tim Gorman
Tim Gorman has worked in IT with relational databases since 1984, as an Oracle PRO*C and PL/SQL application developer since 1990, as an Oracle DBA since 1993, and managing/designing very large data warehouses on Oracle since 1994. He is an independent consultant (www.EvDBT.com) specializing in data warehousing and database administration (particularly performance and availability). Mr Gorman is currently president of the Rocky Mtn Oracle Users Group (www.RMOUG.org) where he has been a member since 1993 and a board member since 1995, has co-authored five books (three with the Oak Table Press), performed technical review on eight more books, has been an Oracle ACE since 2007 and an Oracle ACE Director since 2012, a member of the Oak Table Network since 2002, and has presented at Oracle Open World, Collaborate, Kaleidoscope, Hotsos, and local Oracle users groups in lots of wonderful places around the world. http://www.EvDBT.com
Greg Rahn
Currently working at Cloudera on Hadoop and Big Data challenges. Prior to Cloudera I worked as a database performance engineer in the Real-World Performance Group at Oracle Corporation for over 8 years (2004-2012) and started working with Oracle databases in 1997.
Blog:http://structureddata.org/ Twitter: @GregRahn
Alex Gorbachev
Few DBAs are as well equipped as Alex to handle any kind of database scenario. Alex has architected and designed numerous successful database solutions addressing challenging business requirements. Alex is a respected figure in the Oracle world and a sought-after leader and speaker at Oracle conferences around the globe. He regularly publishes articles on the Pythian blog and runs online webinars. Alex is a member of OakTable Network and an Oracle ACE Director.
Today, Alex is working at The Pythian Group. He started at Pythian in Ottawa, leading a team of database experts before moving to Australia to embrace the challenges of setting up company business in the East Asia/Pacific region. Now he’s back in Ottawa as Pythian’s Chief Technology Officer, continuing to bridge the gap between business and technology. The search for the perfect fit between technology, engineering talents and business processes is what keeps him up at night.
Before joining Pythian, Alex developed and administered Oracle databases and applications for Lukoil, the Russian petrochemicals giant. Later, he led design and implementation of high-availability mission-critical databases for Amadeus in Germany, the leading Global Distribution System and biggest processor of travel bookings in the world.
Alex is an Oracle Ace Director.
Connor McDonald
Connor has been working with Oracle software for 17 years for clients in Australia and the UK. He is a member of the OakTable, is an Oracle Ace Director, and has co-authored three Oracle books. He has been a popular speaker at Oracle conferences around the world for the decade, specialising in topics regarding the database engine and PL/SQL.
Find his blog connormcdonald.wordpress.com/
Gwen Shapira
Gwen Shapira is a Senior Oracle DBA at Pythian, and the company’s newest Oracle ACE. Gwen Shapira studied computer science, statistics, and operations research at the University of Tel Aviv, and then went on to spend the next ten years in different technical positions in the IT industry.
Gwen is an OakTable member, Oracle ACE and Oracle Certified Professional. She specializes in scalability and high-availability solutions such as RAC and Streams, and has presented at various conferences including Hotsos Symposium 2009 and RMOUG 2010. Gwen Shapira also maintains a popular Oracle related blog: http://prodlife.wordpress.com.
Christian Antognini
Since 1995, Christian Antognini has focused on understanding how the Oracle database engine works. His main interests include logical and physical database design, the integration of databases with Java applications, the query optimizer and basically everything else related to application performance management and optimization. He is currently working as a senior principal consultant and trainer at Trivadis in Zürich, Switzerland.
If Christian is not helping one of his customers get the most out of Oracle, he is somewhere lecturing on application performance management or new Oracle Database features for developers. In addition to classes and seminars organized by Trivadis, he regularly presents at conferences and user-group meetings. He is a proud member of the OakTable Network.
Christian is the author of the book Troubleshooting Oracle Performance (Apress, 2008).
Karl Arao
Kristofferson “Karl” Arao is a Senior Technical Consultant at Enkitec.
Some of his experiences as a DBA include Proactive database maintenance, Database Installation and Configuration for High Availability and Disaster Recovery, Migration and Upgrades, Backup and Recovery, Database Hardening, Capacity Planning, and Performance Tuning. He shares his experiences, adventures, and discoveries in his Blog (karlarao.wordpress.com) and owns a Wiki site (karlarao.tiddlyspot.com) where he shares his quick guides and documentations on technologies.
Karl Arao is an Oracle Ace (bit.ly/karlarao), OCP-DBA, and RHCE. He presents at local Oracle Events and DBA round tables, and has also presented at the recent Oracle Open World Unconference and Oracle Closed World. He is also a proud member of the Philippine Software Industry Association Technology Council.

John has been hanging out in the Database area and Systems Programming since graduating with degrees in Math/Computer Science in 1981. Switched over to Oracle 15 years ago and currently employed as Senior Oracle DBA for Summit Racing. Vice President of North East Ohio Oracle Users Group ( http://www.neooug.org ) and in 2011 a first time presenter at OOW. Loves to run and so far still faster than his teen age athletes. A dinosaur using yahoo for email hurleyjohnb@yahoo.com
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