Concurrency at Hotsos

Everyone says that the best way to go to a conference is to be a speaker. For the last 2 years I’ve been trying to go to Hotsos symposium, but I never got the time and budget for this.

So when Hotsos published a call for papers for the 2009 symposium, sending in an abstract or two with my ideas seemed to make sense. Nothing to lose, right?

I did not expect to have my abstract accepted. And now my name is up there in the speakers list, between Cary Millsap  and Chris Date. Somehow, I don’t feel like I fit in. Its been few month since I heard the news and I can still barely believe it.

Of course, now management had no choice, and I’ll get to go to HotSos and listen to terrific technical sessions from very smart people. Yay!

My  session is going to be about concurrency errors. Its a HUGE topic and it was discussed a lot in the past, so I’m working hard to find a unique and interesting angle on this, and to avoid reiterating topics that were discussed to death. My unique take on concurrency is taking classical concurrency problems from OS research, translating them to Oracle and show how they can be used to solve common issues in DB development. There will also be a fair bit of statistics and web servers thrown in because thats what I know, do and love.

I’m planning to talk a lot about testing because concurrency problems are notoriously difficult to test for. I’ll mention some statistical techniques to find concurrency problems, because this is something I didn’t see mentioned before, and I’m very happy whenever I can use my statistics education in real life.

I want to discuss lots of OS theory because so much of it applies directly to Oracle and I want everyone to benefit from the research that was done in a related field. This means talking about queuing and also about process management overheads.

I want to talk about the problems that many application servers inadvertly cause on the database side – such as allowing a user to click refresh on a large report again and again. I see these all the time.

I’ll also talk about starvation a bit, simply because I didn’t hear it discussed yet. And there is a very special case of deadlock that I’d love to talk about, if I could just get a good test case for it.

Thats quite a lot of stuff I want to talk about, and I’ll probably have to make some painfull cuts. This is after I already had to painfully cut a bunch of stuff that I decided not to talk about.

For example, deadlocks are the most well known and well researched concurrency mistake, so I’ll not spend lot of time on it. Why waste time when I can just point to Mark bobak’s presentation from HotSoS few years back (http://www.oaktable.net/userFiles.jsp)?

I’ll also have to skip talking about concurrency problems on RAC. Its a fascinating topic, but its a huge one on its own. Maybe next year? I’ll also have to skip talking about undo+redo overheads caused by many concurrent updates, and latch contentions, and hot blocks… these are all fascinating and relevant aspects that I just could not fit in.

I hope I’ll manage to pull all of these ideas into a good presentation. I hope lots of people will show up and enjoy it. I’m sure HotSoS will be an amazing conference. Its in two month, but I’m already very excited about it.

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