Oracle

As Oracle OpenWorld is just around the corner and you are probably getting your session schedule together, I thought I’d pass on this (nearly complete) list of sessions of which one or more of the presenters is an OakTable member. There is no doubt in my mind that these sessions will contain some of...
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There seems to be little debate that Oracle’s launch of the Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the Sun Oracle Database Machine has created buzz in the database marketplace. Apparently there is so much buzz and excitement around these products that two competing vendors, Teradata and Netezza, have both authored publications that contain a significant...
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In over six years of doing data warehouse POCs and benchmarks for clients there is one area that I frequently see as problematic: “batch jobs”.  Most of the time these “batch jobs” take the form of some PL/SQL procedures and packages that generally perform some data load, transformation, processing or something...
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Now that Oracle OpenWorld 2010 is just under 70 days away I thought I would take a moment to mention that the Oracle Real-World Performance Group will again be hosting three sessions.   This year I think we have a very exciting and informative lineup of sessions that are a must-attend for those wanting to...
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As a member of the Real-World Performance Group at Oracle I have participated in quite a number of Exadata POCs over the past two years. Often times those POCs are constrained in a number of ways: time, schema/app modifications, etc., because the objective is a proof, not a full blown migration. As a result...
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Just a quick post that the 10.2.0.5 patch set for Oracle Database Server was released for x86 & x86-64 platforms on April 29th. The patchset number is 8202632 and is available for download from My Oracle Support.
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Getting flat file data into your Oracle data warehouse is likely a daily (or more possibly frequent) task, but it certainly does not have to be a difficult one.  Bulk loading data rates are governed by the following operations and hardware resources: How fast can the data be read How fast can data be...
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Leveraging Oracle’s Parallel Execution (PX) in your Oracle data warehouse is probably the most important feature/technology one can use to speed up operations on large data sets.  PX is not, however, “go fast” magic pixi dust for any old operation (if thats what you think, you probably don’t understand the parallel...
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Partitioning is an essential performance feature for an Oracle data warehouse because partition elimination (or partition pruning) generally results in the elimination of a significant amount of table data to be scanned. This results in a need for less system resources and improved query performance. Someone once told me “the fastest...
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Editor’s note: This blog post does not cover Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression. The first thing that comes to most people’s mind when database table compression is mentioned is the savings it yields in terms of disk space. While reducing the footprint of data on disk is relevant, I would argue it...
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I tend to keep the content of this blog fairly technical and engineering focused, but every now and then I have to venture off and do an editorial post.  Recently some of the ParAccel management decided to fire up the FUD machine on the ParAccel blog and take aim at Oracle’s Exadata making the...
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Another year in the books and another year on the Structured Data blog.  Hopefully 2009 treated you well and 2010 will bring good things in addition.  I thought I’d throw a few Top 5 lists together to reminisce about 2009.  Enjoy! Top 5 Most Visited Blog Posts of 2009 DBMS_STATS, METHOD_OPT and FOR ALL...
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