I just got back home from an outstanding two-day Seminar of Index Guru Richard Foote. He was coming all the way from Canberra, Australia for this seminar in Munich and next week´s in Prague. I can highly recommend this seminar to any Oracle professional interested in Performance Analysis in general and indexes in particular. He has the rare gift of explaining quite complex operations very simply, sometimes even entertaining. He finished the ~ 700 slides exactly as planned at 5 p.m. the second day, on the minute. The seminar was very well worth the money. Although he starts from the basics in regards of indexes, in my opinion the seminar is quite advanced. What is very special about the seminar is that it is unique and there is no other training material or documentation around, which has such a strong focus on index internals.

I have learned quite a lot about index internals (and even some David Bowie albums) during the 2 days and understood almost everything. However, I am still puzzled about the meaning of some Ozzie phrases like “diggysquat”, “doggledigook”, “dadada” or “presto” (although this one sounds like italian…).

If you have a chance to attend to a seminar of Richard or even a presentation on one of the major conferences – don´t miss it. BTW, Richard also blogs at http://richardfoote.wordpress.com. You can see the seminars agenda at http://richardfoote.wordpress.com/oracle-index-internals-seminar/ and you can get a taste of it in http://richardfoote.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/index-internals-rebuilding-the-truth-ii.pdf

I might even check out amazon.com for one of those Bowie albums now…