Oracle

what's new in Siebel 8.0

Siebel 8.0 is the first major release since the Oracle takeover and is now imminent.

Oracle are planning a simultaneous launch of five different products (JD Edwards, E-Business, PeopleSoft and Siebel 8.0) on 31 January 2007.

Ed Abbo (VP CRM products) will be chairing the Siebel session and SearchCRM has an interesting (albeit low quality) interview podcast with Ed where he talks about new features in Siebel 8.0, CRM OnDemand and the impact of the Oracle takeover on Siebel’s development and strategy.

philosophy of Oracle contractors

My. How times change. In my day, the philosophy was simple:

• Always be sick in your own time.
• Ensure a newspaper is safely cached behind the toilet cistern.
• Arrive and leave the office 30 seconds before/after your manager.
• Get an urgent pager alert whenever your round is imminent.
• Be quick to claim credit and divert blame.

But no. I have now finally discovered the true Oracle Contractors Philosophy.

probably the best feature in Oracle 10g

Regularly refreshing Oracle statistics on all tables, indexes and column histograms flushes the shared pool and can occasionally lead to some unexpected and unpleasant surprises.

Thankfully, Oracle 10g automatically maintains 31 days of statistics history which means it is trivial to revert to a previous set in order to restore service to the production environment while you investigate further.

A perfectly valid strategy for statistics gathering is to gather, test, validate, save and leave well alone.

in praise of CBO

Jonathan Lewis poses a very interesting question:

Have you ever wondered how hard the optimizer has to work to produce a plan ?

Well actually Jonathan, curiously enough I have. Many times, in fact.

Siebel 7.7 (released in 2004) was the first version of Siebel to support the Oracle cost based optimizer (CBO) and pleased a lot of demanding Oracle DBA’s who looked contemptuously on the 10 year old rule based optimizer (RBO) technology and had long petitioned Siebel to finally add support for CBO to improve performance, support table partitioning, parallel query, bitmap indexes and lots of other features they wanted to use (i.e learn about).

suggestions for Metalink

1. Tighten security for all parties by addressing this issue:

   ‘The Password must contain only ASCII alphanumeric characters.’

2. The ‘Quick Links to the Latest Patchsets’ is a great idea spoilt only by the absurd complexity in navigating the resulting pull-down.

If you possess the hand/eye co-ordination and reflexes to successfully navigate to the correct platform and the desired version first time, you could probably make a fortune playing those impossible ‘Win a cuddly lion with this crane like mechanism’ kiosks at the fun fair.

recycle pool #1: Oracle

Good evening. My name is ‘Google Bot’. It was a difficult (N-P complete) and very time consuming task to decide on the precise content for this article. After all, I have crawled 2.6 billion pages in the last seven days so I am a little tired. However, here is the pick of the blogosphere for November.

Oracle release 10.2.0.3 patch set (currently available on Linux only). This release includes several fixes related to the cost based optimizer. Siebel 7.8 customers using Oracle 10g should note the following bug fixes:

dose of your own medicine

I had the misfortune to visit a very angry customer today. He was having problems loading customer data into Siebel. I sat him down with a nice cup of tea and invited him to tell me all about his woes.

‘Well Norman - it’s like this you see. We used to be able to load 400,000 contacts per hour. Now performance is absolutely abysmal and it takes 12 minutes to load just 1,000.’

custom Oracle search engine

Google Co-op is a customisable Google search engine and I just created a personalised, custom search for Oracle that scours AskTom, Jonathan Lewis’ site and www.oracle.com (including TechNet).

This targetted search is useful and will undoubtedly save me time. However, I was unable to get any results from ‘tahiti.oracle.com’ (Oracle documentation set) which is normally my first port of call. Also, I assume Metalink is similarly off limits (account required).

the never ending quest for the truth

Modern versions of Siebel use the Cost Based Optimizer (CBO) so the strategy used for gathering (and refreshing) statistics and histograms becomes increasingly important.

Sometimes, the strategy can be articulated by the Oracle DBA or may even be documented or SQL scripts may be supplied that define the strategy.

Normally, however, the definitive version of the truth lies in the data dictionary.

    SQL> exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(ownname=>user,tabname=>'PERSON',cascade=>TRUE,
    method_opt=>'FOR ALL COLUMNS SIZE AUTO');
    SQL> select column_name,
    to_char(last_analyzed, 'mm/dd/yyyy hh24:mi:ss') as last_analyzed, num_nulls,
    global_stats, user_stats
    from user_tab_col_statistics where table_name='PERSON' and column_name = 'SALARY';
    COLUMN_NAME         LAST_ANALYZED       NUM_NULLS   GLOBAL USER
    SALARY              10/23/2006 14:55:15    0         YES       NO
    SQL> exec dbms_stats.set_column_stats(ownname=>user,tabname=>'PERSON',colname=>'SALARY',
    nullcnt=>1000000);
    SQL> /
    COLUMN_NAME         LAST_ANALYZED       NUM_NULLS  GLOBAL USER
    SALARY              10/23/2006 14:55:18   1000000   YES       YES

So when trying to answer to question: ‘Have you ever had cause to manually populate column statistics ?’, although the Oracle DBA is your friend, the USER_STATS column in the DBA_TAB_COL_STATISTICS view is your best friend.

is it really worth it ?

I have never heard customers complaining about the abysmal performance of the Oracle pseudo-table DUAL. Nor have I ever encountered a real-life performance issue that was attributed to slow access to DUAL. Rarely have I been asked to tune an SQL statement that was sub-second and took a massive 3 consistent gets.

Another reason I won’t be using this tip is that, a few years ago, I did encounter some unexpected, weird, obtuse behaviour in an Oracle system that completely baffled everyone. This was eventually tracked to the presence of not one, but two rows in the DUAL table.