Oracle Insights: Tales from the OakTable 

Contributing Author

Oracle Wait Interface 

Technical Editor

Chapter 6: Direct Memory Access, by Kyle Hailey
Because of the developer in me, this was one of my favorite chapters. Kyle Hailey relays a story about having met and worked with an Oracle master named Roger Sanders and his "m2" application, which could access the memory Oracle was using directly. Having opened our minds to the possibilities, his story leads into a discussion on Oracle's SGA (Shared memory) and DMA, leaving you thirsting for more. A very memorable chapter for fans of the nuts and bolts, and yet is not that heavy a read.

I strongly recommend Kyle Hailey's talk to all DBAs
 - Chen Shapira

If you are in the right geography ( or perhaps geography doesn't matter, I don't know) and need a real heavy hitter, I.d recommend contacting PerfVision.com and have a chat with Kyle. Kevin Closson

On Friday, I.ve been to a training day with Kyle Hailey, organized by North California Oracle User Group. It was really a great experience. The first part of the day was dedicated to ASH - v$active_session_history. We learned how to use the data, how to use the related graphs in Enterprise Manager, and how to get similar data when you don.t have the ASH table (ASH requires 10g and a special license). I already worked with ASH before, but it was still very interesting and usefull. The second part of the day was dedicated to specific wait events - why they happen and how to deal with them. The talk was very technical - including overviews of the buffer cache memory management (I didn.t know Oracle keeps the buffer cache in a hash table), and explanations of all the scenarios where you can run into TX-Enqueue lock. There are more scenarios than you think, and most of them will be hell to debug. We also received a copy of .Oracle Wait Interface: A Practical Guide to Performance Diagnostics and Tuning., I.ve starting reading it during the weekend and it seems like a useful and interesting book. Maybe I.ll review it when I.m done. I was really impressed by the audience. No one asked stupid and annoying questions, on the contrary, many people had very insightful comments and questions. Everyone I talked to during the breaks was interesting, had interesting experiences to share and great comments when listening to my war stories. Can you tell I.ve had fun? I.ve also learned that I.m probably the only DBA who did not try ASM yet. I really have to get to it. So, hurray to NoCoug who organized this great day. I strongly recommend Kyle Hailey.s talk to all DBAs.

I enjoyed Kyle Hailey talk on Average Active Session metric that.s designed to give DBA a general idea of database load. Excellent review of history of Oracle Enterprise Manager performance development (Kyle is actually the one who designed the whole Performance tab in 10g Grid Control). The highlight was announcement of SASH - Simulated ASH or, as I call it, poor man.s ASH. It.s based on custom sampling of V$SESSION and presenting it in ASH format. It works on any edition and, the best part, it.s free! He also demonstrated ASHMON . basically, OEM Performance Tab light . written in TCL. Thanks for excellent tools Kyle . you rock!

The fourth presentation I went to was by Kyle Hailey "Average Active Sessions: a Simple Solution to Complex Performance Data" He showed us how to drill into problems by using OEM and how much easier that was then using Tanel Poder.s scripts. But offcours you need a license to use that. It.s the same for the ASH tables, you need a license. But for his SASH tables you do not need a license nor for his OEM-lite. OEM-lite is a graphical tool that you can use to do similar things as with OEM and you can zoom into the details of the graphs by drawing a box with your mouse. Pretty cool stuff. Unfortunately he had so much to Demo and so many slides that he had to use more time then was alotted. Fortunately he was a very enthousiastic presenter and fun to watch.

One Thursday and Friday I managed to attend sessions by Kyle and Jeremiah (but I collided with Richard's high level Index session). These guys have it together - I highly recommend listening to them if you get a chance.

Average Active Sessions
The last presentation I went to was by Kyle Hailey. I really enjoyed hearing from Kyle. He.s pretty straightforward and just makes a lot of sense. His presentation was on the Active Session History metric available in Oracle. He.s written a number of tools that can help pull the metric around Active Session History out of Oracle. Feel free to look at his presentation on wait events as well.

Dear Reader,
            Kyle is somewhat different from most of the other male Oaktable members. For one thing, he actually seems to know how to dress. We also suspect he has dozens of girls all over the World just waiting for him to stop by some day (but we've never been able to prove it).
            Kyle used to work in Oracle Development before he moved to Paris, where he spent several years in Gold Support, along with a bunch of first class French supporters.
            He was the first person to introduce me to the wait interface, having had it introduced to him by the legendary Roger Sanders, whilst on the Brushco project. Kyle always ruthlessly shares with others the things that he learns about Oracle and IT in general, without ever hesitating.
            Kyle worked for Quest for a while, and then rejoined Oracle in an exciting project: the idea was to bring a dream team into Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) development. The four chosen ones where Gaja Vaidyanatha, James Morle, John Beresniewicz, and Kyle (all of them OakTable members), and they were to do exciting things with the product, its architecture, and much more. The thinking behind their work will show up in the coming years in the OEM family of products, I'm sure.
            Meanwhile, as I'm, writing these works, Kyle has disappeared The editor can't find him, his Hotmail account is full and returns an error, and he's simply not available for comments as they say. Rumors have it that he has gone surfing (again) in some exotic place, probably spending his space time developing cool, visual applications for OEM. But we don't know for sure. One day he'll pop up again and pretend nothing has happened, and refuse to go into any details.
            So there's Kyle for you: open, friendly, speaks French, incredibly intelligent and sharp, always polite, ell dressed, cosmopolitan, sporty ... in other words, the typical OakTable member (just kidding!).
            In this chapter Kyle gives you the background for the DMA (Direct Memory Access) work he's been doing besides his real work over the last couple of years. It's a very fascinating piece of work, and Kyle has achieved impressive results with it. As you may have guessed, Kyle has been eager to share his findings with the community, being the true scientist he is.
            So if you ever get a chance to meet Kyle, take advantage of it before he moves on to the next beach!
            Mogens Nørgaard
            Miracle Consulting