Skip to main content

Optimizing PL/SQL Panel at Oracle Open World 2015 - Questions welcome!

At Oracle Open World 2014, I was a member of a panel on SQL and PL/SQL Performance. It was an awful lot of fun, but as I had expected, most of the questions focused on SQL performance, and most of them were answered by Tom Kyte (no complaints from me!).

I came away with a strong feeling that we should offer separate panels on SQL and PL/SQL, so that each could get the proper amount of attention (or as "proper" as you can get in 45 minutes. Sigh...).

Well, my wish has come true!

There will be a panel on SQL for Functionality, Performance and Maintainability, and its future, and another on PL/SQL:
Optimizing PL/SQL for Performance and Maintainability (CON8416)
Moscone South - 306, Wednesday, October 28th, 13:45 - 14:30
Notice that we are suggesting that when it comes to "optimization," we should all be thinking about more than performance. Performance is, justifiably, a primary concern for any application developer (and DBA), but that doesn't mean it should be the sole concern.

A truly optimal application is also optimized for maintainability - the ability, namely, to fix and enhance that application over time in a way that does not consume too much of the resources of the dev team (such that it is hard to find time to build new apps, always our preference). 

We've pulled together panel that is composed mostly of expert users, not (just) Oracle employees. Sure, Bryn Llewellyn (Distinguished Product Manager, PL/SQL and EBR) will be there. And I will moderate the panel, throwing in my two cents now and then. 

But we are most excited to welcome the following "real world" expert PL/SQL developers to answer questions and share their experiences:
  • Martin Buechi,  Lead Software Architect at Avaloq Evolution AG and 2009 PL/SQL Developer of the Year
  • Kim Berg Hansen,  Senior System Developer at T.Hansen Gruppen A/S and SQL Quizmaster at the PL/SQL Challenge
  • Marcelle Kratochvil,  CTO and Co-Founder of Piction and an Oracle Database multimedia expert
So if you are attending Oracle OpenWorld and you develop applications using PL/SQL, please do join us! We will be taking questions from the audience, but if you cannot attend the session, we also encourage you to post your question as a comment on this post.

We will then answer as many as possible during the session.

Of course, you can always ask a question about SQL and PL/SQL at the OTN Community Forum, or tweet me or Bryn.

Because we all know that Twitter is the best way to discuss complex technology like Oracle Database.

:-) 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Running out of PGA memory with MULTISET ops? Watch out for DISTINCT!

A PL/SQL team inside Oracle made excellent use of nested tables and MULTISET operators in SQL, blending data in tables with procedurally-generated datasets (nested tables).  All was going well when they hit the dreaded: ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate 2032 bytes  They asked for my help.  The error occurred on this SELECT: SELECT  *    FROM header_tab trx    WHERE (generated_ntab1 SUBMULTISET OF trx.column_ntab)       AND ((trx.column_ntab MULTISET             EXCEPT DISTINCT generated_ntab2) IS EMPTY) The problem is clearly related to the use of those nested tables. Now, there was clearly sufficient PGA for the nested tables themselves. So the problem was in executing the MULTISET-related functionality. We talked for a bit about dropping the use of nested tables and instead doing everything in SQL, to avoid the PGA error. That would, however require lots of wo...

How to Pick the Limit for BULK COLLECT

This question rolled into my In Box today: In the case of using the LIMIT clause of BULK COLLECT, how do we decide what value to use for the limit? First I give the quick answer, then I provide support for that answer Quick Answer Start with 100. That's the default (and only) setting for cursor FOR loop optimizations. It offers a sweet spot of improved performance over row-by-row and not-too-much PGA memory consumption. Test to see if that's fast enough (likely will be for many cases). If not, try higher values until you reach the performance level you need - and you are not consuming too much PGA memory.  Don't hard-code the limit value: make it a parameter to your subprogram or a constant in a package specification. Don't put anything in the collection you don't need. [from Giulio Dottorini] Remember: each session that runs this code will use that amount of memory. Background When you use BULK COLLECT, you retrieve more than row with each fetch, ...

PL/SQL 101: Save your source code to files

PL/SQL is a database programming language. This means that your source code is compiled into  and executed from within the Oracle Database. There are many fantastic consequences of this fact, many of which are explored in Bryn Llewellyn's Why Use PL/SQL? whitepaper. But this also can mean that developers see the database as the natural repository for the original source code , and this is a bad mistake to make. It's not the sort of mistake any JavaScript or Java or php developer would ever make, because that code is not compiled into the database (well, you can  compile Java into the database, but that's not where 99.99% of all Java code lives). But it's a mistake that apparently too many Oracle Database developers make. So here's the bottom line: Store each PL/SQL program unit in its own file . Use a source code control system to manage those files. Compile them into the database as needed for development and testing. In other words: you should never kee...