Performance tuning Seminar by Craig Shallahamer

I attended a 2 day seminar on "Reactive Performance Management" organized by Oracle University last week and the speaker was well-known Oracle guru Craig Shallahamer of OraPub.

Craig covered latching mechanism, SGA (Buffer and Shared Pool) management in detail. Though he did not get into in depth details but coverage was enough to refresh the memory.

Craig presented his methodology in tracking performance problem and identify potential tuning areas. He presented a model wherein he tries to identify bottlenecks at 3 different layers namely Oracle, Operating System and Application. He focused on using the wait events to diagnose and come up with solutions for each of the 3 layers. He emphasized the need to present the findings in such a manner that management (non-technical) people can understand and appreciate your work.

I had very high expectations from the seminar but unfortunately they were not met. At times, questions remained unanswered. However Craig was very honest in his responses and did not try to mislead. On the whole it was a refresher for me. All of us have an approach but the seminar enabled us to look at it more holistically. I specially liked his teaching method and honesty in his responses when he did not have an answer. Personally I felt his explanation on latching in a very easy to understand method was very good.