Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting by Tanel Poder..

.. is over. His seminar in Riga was real fun for two days. It was different from the big guys' seminars I've attended before (for example, Thomas Kyte and Jonathan Lewis). Not in the way that it was or wasn't somehow better or not, but in the way that Tanel spoke more about:

• internal memory structures (x$ tables), process stacks, Oracle kernel functions and their mapping to SQL statement execution plan steps;
• understanding structure of library cache, process state objects, buffer cache;
• dumping cursors, trace buffers, process stack;
• systematic troubleshooting a session and finding the root cause of slowness and what it is doing now;
• and many more subjects.

Lots of live demos, nothing like an Oracle documentation rephrase, narrative explanation of quite advanced technical things - these were the main characteristics of this seminar.

Some previous understanding of Operating systems basic functions, commands and Oracle architecture however is a must, otherwise you simply will be overwhelmed by new information and won't be able to follow the main idea. On the other hand I'm absolutely not a sysadmin and/or true DBA, but I understood let's say 95% of the material provided ;)

So the conclusion is - I definitely recommend it for the people interested in these topics.