HrOUG 2026
Performance is Rarely an Accident
Performance is a feature – that’s ancient wisdom. So it’s time to discuss the matter in detail, is it?
Why you can’t watch a road without thinking of two dimensions of power, what software design and fast food franchisers have in common, and where priority really matters.
Let’s learn the basics of profiling, about the backbites of parallel processing, from the Magic of Q, about scalability, to be the Master of the Time, and what is possible and what is not.
Let’s talk about Queueing Theory, have fun with average values, play with the user’s feeling of performance and degradation, joking with throughput and response time.
Let’s use hard and soft elbows, visual helpers, a bucket and a wall clock.
The overhead of the talk is 40 minutes, the hangover immense. 🙂
TNS Connections – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
More than you might think. Firewalls, TCP timeouts, idle connections, SCAN and local listeners, or version mismatches between client, database, and connectors – all of these can impact TNS connections and cause unexpected errors. This session uses real-world examples to show the most common root causes, demonstrate relevant analysis tools available at both the database and operating system level, and explain the role of encryption, character sets, and NLS settings.
Complemented by selected special topics, the talk offers a collection of proven troubleshooting tips, best practices, and “aha” moments from real projects – ensuring that TNS connections are no longer a point of uncertainty, but a reliable part of your system.
For all DBAs, developers, and administrators who work regularly with Oracle databases and want to better understand and resolve TNS-related issues.
Cat Pics and Kill Chains – AI in Modern Warfare
For many of us in IT, artificial intelligence is a favorite toy – or even a source of income. But it has long since become part of everyday military operations – and there’s a hot war in Europe, just 1,500 km from my home. AI there is used to kill people – and that’s no game. It’s supposed to tell tanks from tractors, control missiles and drones, optimize logistics, and support command structures. But wars are chaotic and improvised – sometimes low-tech beats high-tech, and even Goliath struggles when facing a pesky David. In this talk, we bring together military terminology, IT technology, and ethics: from staging areas to image recognition, from “effectors” powered by NVIDIA chipsets and trained models to the fully automated kill chain. We’ll examine the strengths and weaknesses of military AI systems, look at real-world examples from the war in Ukraine, and discuss ethical questions such as “meaningful human control,” “dual-use”, and “ex-post accountability”. This session is aimed at IT professionals who want to understand how technology and the military interact in wartime – without offering simple answers to complex questions.