Where's Hotsos Clinic?
Are We Nuts?
The Hotsos Clinic is the most popular training course in the early history of Hotsos. Yet, it's no longer on the curriculum. What happened to it?
As many people who returned to take the Hotsos Clinic a second or third time already know, the Hotsos Clinic syllabus evolved rapidly from 2000 through 2003. As we added information to the course, we came to the point where we simply had too much stuff to cram into a single three-day course. So, in the fourth quarter of 2003, we revised our curriculum, re-focusing (and renaming) the Hotsos Clinic, and creating other new courses in the process.
New Curriculum
All the original Hotsos Clinic material is still on our curriculum. We've just re-allocated the material into a bigger catalog of courses with better focus:
Diagnosing Oracle Performance Problems
Our PD101 course is the next-generation Hotsos Clinic. Hotsos Clinic alumni still qualify for PD101 alumni pricing. By contrast to the original Clinic, however, PD101 now focuses entirely upon diagnosing Oracle performance problems. In response to student feedback, PD101 differs from the original Hotsos Clinic in the following ways:
We have shortened the first morning's lecture on why a new method is necessary. These days, most people who come to our courses already understand the huge deficiencies of traditional trial-and-error performance tuning “methods.”
We have relegated the detailed discussion of the origins of Oracle timing data to another course. Many of our students found this “why it works” section to be a distraction compared to the opportunity for more discussion and case studies.
We have relegated the detailed discussion of SQL tuning to another course. SQL tuning is simply too large a subject to cover in a 4-hour lecture. A SQL tuning course needs to last longer, and it needs to be hands-on.
We have relegated the discussion about queueing theory to another course, for the same reason.
We have dedicated the entire third day to case studies and discussion of performance problems and their solutions.
Optimizing Oracle SQL, Part I
Most of our original Hotsos Clinic students felt very strongly about our early attempts at teaching SQL optimization in a four-hour lecture. Some students loved it, and complained that the segment was far too short. Others hated it, complaining that they felt left behind. The complete absence of hands-on practice was a common criticism.
In response, we invested much of 2003 into the construction of our new OP101 course. This four-day laboratory course walks students through the process of how to set up a SQL performance testing infrastructure, how to test performance for themselves in brief experiments rather than trust the poor advice of the so-called experts, and how to negotiate the necessary trade-offs imposed by huge, complex applications.