My First UKOUG - day one

Last week the UKOUG-TEBS conference was in Birmingham. For whatever reason I had the idea that this conference was fairly small - no idea why I thought that.
The conference was held in the ICC in Birmingham, a wonderful location.

The line up of speakers was very impressive (amongst others): Tom Kyte, Cary Millsap, Jonathan Lewis, Graham Wood, John Scott, and the list goes on and on and on...

The first session I went to was by Tom Kyte. Even though I had already seen "What's new in Oracle Database Application Development" during the Oracle Open World, it is still a very good session. My other objective was to check out the room (after lunch on Monday, I had the same room).
Next was "Simplifying your Data Audits with Oracle 11g's Total Recall" by Melanie Caffrey. In this session she described the way she used Total Recall (a.k.a. Flashback Data Archive) for data auditing. After the presentation there was enough room for discussion which was very valuable. Something I forgot, but was reminded of in this session: Total Recall underwent some in Oracle 11g Release 2, like the support for DDL.
Graham Wood did a session on "Features you probably didn't know and are FREE", which he refined to "mostly free". One of the things he mentioned was the "ADVANCED" argument of the Display_Cursor function in the DBMS_XPLAN package. Just a short demo:

SQL> set serveroutput off
SQL>
SQL> var empno number
SQL>
SQL> exec :empno := 7788

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SQL>
SQL> select *
  2    from emp
  3   where empno = :empno
  4  /

     EMPNO ENAME      JOB              MGR HIREDATE         SAL       COMM     DEPTNO
---------- ---------- --------- ---------- --------- ---------- ---------- ----------
      7788 SCOTT      ANALYST         7566 09-DEC-82       3000                    20

1 row selected.

SQL>
SQL> select *
  2    from table (dbms_xplan.display_cursor (null, null, 'ADVANCED'))
  3  /

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SQL_ID  0nb4mtjxa5k10, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select *   from emp  where empno = :empno

Plan hash value: 3956160932

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation         | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT  |      |       |       |     2 (100)|          |
|*  1 |  TABLE ACCESS FULL| EMP  |     1 |    37 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query Block Name / Object Alias (identified by operation id):
-------------------------------------------------------------

   1 - SEL$1 / EMP@SEL$1

Outline Data
-------------

  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('10.2.0.1')
      ALL_ROWS
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$1" "EMP"@"SEL$1")
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Peeked Binds (identified by position):
--------------------------------------

   1 - :EMPNO (NUMBER): 7788

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   1 - filter("EMPNO"=:EMPNO)

Column Projection Information (identified by operation id):
-----------------------------------------------------------

   1 - "EMPNO"[NUMBER,22], "EMP"."ENAME"[VARCHAR2,10],
       "EMP"."JOB"[VARCHAR2,9], "EMP"."MGR"[NUMBER,22],
       "EMP"."HIREDATE"[DATE,7], "EMP"."SAL"[NUMBER,22],
       "EMP"."COMM"[NUMBER,22], "EMP"."DEPTNO"[NUMBER,22]


49 rows selected.

Notice all the extra information that you get, very cool.
After Lunch I had my own session on Analytic Functions. It took place in Hall One - one of the largest rooms on site (still very impressed with that). Had some nice feedback, thank you Boneist.
Debra Lilley taped the first two minutes of my session,... nervous: yes
Unfortunately Pete Finnigan's session was cancelled, but that gave me some room to visit the OTN lounge and talk to some people.
That SQL is a weird and wonderful language I already knew, but in the session of Carl Dudley he put all of it together in a single session.
Last show of the day was the Panto...
Later day two and three.