Data Warehousing

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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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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If you want to build a house that will stand the test of time, you need to build on a solid foundation. The same goes for architecting computer systems that run databases. If the underlying hardware is not sized appropriately it will likely lead to people blaming software. All too often...
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At the 2009 Oracle OpenWorld Unconference back in October I lead a chalk and talk session entitled The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing. Since this was a chalk and talk I spared the audience any powerpoint slides but I had several people request that make it into a presentation so they could...
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A number of weeks back I had come across a paper/presentation by Riyaj Shamsudeen entitled Battle of the Nodes: RAC Performance Myths (avaiable here). As I was looking through it I saw one example that struck me as very odd (Myth #3 – Interconnect Performance) and I contacted him about it. After further review...
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Oracle Corporation had its F4Q09 earnings call today and the Exadata comments started right away with the earnings press release: “The Exadata Database Machine is well on its way to being the most successful new product launch in Oracle’s 30 year history,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Several of Teradata’s largest customers are performance...
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Today, June 10th, marks the Yahoo! Hadoop Summit ’09 and the crew at Facebook have a writeup on the Facebook Engineering page entitled: Hive – A Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse Using Hadoop. I found this an very interesting read given some of the Hadoop/MapReduce comments from David J. DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker as well...
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Oracle and HP have taken back the #1 spot by setting a new performance record in the 1TB TPC-H benchmark. The HP/Oracle result puts the Oracle database ahead of both the Exasol (currently #2 & #3) and ParAccel (currently #4) results in the race for performance at the 1TB scale factor and places Oracle...
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