Ask Tom Live: A 1-day Seminar with Tom Kyte

SQL is an extremely powerful language these days. It offers set-based processing, iteration, and recursion. In short, it has many of the qualities of a procedural language and a declarative language. This session explores five things you probably didn't know about SQL.

PL/SQL turns 24 years old this year—it was first introduced in 1988 with Oracle6 Database. This session looks at five technical things about PL/SQL you probably did not know: under-the-covers features that make PL/SQL quite simply the most efficient language with which to process data in the database.

Based entirely on chapter 7 of Tom's book "Effective Oracle by Design", this session takes you through the fundamentals of physical schema design. It demonstrates the various structures (hash clusters, B*-tree clusters, index-organized tables, ...) and tells when and where you want to use them. The session closes with indexing and compression techniques.

We'll briefly overview why it is extremely important with regards to performance, scalability and even security but quickly move into topics such as: Do I always want to bind? (Surprisingly, the answer is no.) What is bind variable peeking? Is it good or evil in disguise or a bit of both? So the developers don't bindis cursor_sharing=force/similar appropriate system wide? (Emphasis will be on the reasons why setting cursor sharing at the instance level is not such a good idea.) What is the real difference between cursor_sharing=force/similar and which should we use under what circumstances? The presentation will be practical, with many examples and hard numbers you can use in your day-to-day work.

A hotly debated topic is “do I need to reorganize/rebuild indexes and tables”. We will discuss the times when a reorganization or rebuild is relevant, how to measure what you’ve done (to verify that the work performed did something useful!), and the best techniques for performing a reorganization of data.

Audience
Course Topics Five Things You Probably Didn't Know About SQL Five Things You Probably Didn't Know About PL/SQL Efficient schema design All about binding Reorganizing objects – when and how
Course Objectives

• Efficient schema design
• All about binding
• Reorganizing objects