A lot of time is spent by IT professionals studying best practices in the industry. This presentation turns that around and takes a look at some "worst practices," the top things you can do to ensure failure, delays, and poor performance in your database applications. Instead of focusing on things to do in your database applications, the presentation looks at things you should never do. The presentation uses actual customer experiences to investigate the top 10 things done wrong over and over again, and how to avoid making the same mistakes yourself.

How data is stored on disk by Oracle directly affects the speed at which we can retrieve that data (and modify it, and create it and so on). This session will look at the physical structures available to us, discuss when to use each (and when not to!). Techniques such as clustering, index organized storage, partitioning and compression will be investigated.

It is interesting to note how important metadata – data about data – is in the database. One important piece of metadata are database constraints. The database uses constraints for query optimization as well as data integrity. Most people understand that constraints are a ‘data integrity feature’, but are not as aware of the fact that the optimizer relies heavily on metadata to operate at its best. We’ll explore the various types of metadata we as developers and DBA’s can assert into the database and the positive impact this metadata will have on us.

This session covers all of the flashback areas: flashback query, flashback table, flashback row history, flashback drop, and flashback database. Tom explains how each feature is physically implemented; for example, what settings like undo retention and guaranteed undo retention mean and what they do. This session is very in depth (on the "how") so DBA’s can be prepared to allow these features to be used in their database environments.

PL/SQL is Oracle’s procedural extension to SQL, and it is a true 3GL programming language. It was first introduced way back in version 6 of the database, giving us the ability to code “anonymous blocks” in our client applications and submit them for processing on the database. In Oracle6, there were no stored procedures, no packages, and no triggers. The ability to store PL/SQL in the database came with version 7 in 1992. Today, PL/SQL is competent, mature, and full-featured, offering everything you expect to find in a 3GL programming language. In this session, we’ll look at why you should be using PL/SQL in your applications and cover the most important programming techniques that provide efficient, high-performance PL/SQL code.