Tom 'Ask Tom' Kyte's Oracle Develop Keynote: Things you think you know

Tom's keynote talked about how you should be really careful about checking your facts when it comes to technical problems. He challenged the popular assumption that indexes and data should be held in separate tablespaces, saying that this is not necessary. He thought that the myth probably began in the early days when you might be using multiple physical disks, in which case by having the data and indexes in different locations might balance the I/O across the disks. Now that we have SAN storage and other ways of balancing I/O, this is no longer relevant.

He told a great story about a consultant who, having tuned the hell out of a problematic procedure used for printing a report, was running out of ideas when the client insisted that performance was still unacceptable. He took a look at the situation. An employee would hit a button, wait a few minutes for the report (a pick list) to print, then walk to the bins to fill the order. He asked if he could move the printer, and they told him he could. His solution was to move the printer down to near the bins, so that now the employee would hit the button, walk down the hall and go to the printer, where the report was waiting for him, and start picking.