Data Warehousing

Real-World Performance Videos on YouTube – Data Warehousing

June 15, 2011
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Here are some videos of a data warehouse demo that the Real-World Performance Group has been running for a while now and we thought it was time to put them on YouTube. Hope you find them informative. Migrate a 1TB Data warehouse in 20 Minutes (Part 1) Migrate a 1TB Data warehouse in 20...

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Reading Parallel Execution Plans With Bloom Pruning And Composite Partitioning

October 12, 2010
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You’ve probably heard sayings like “sometimes things aren’t always what they seem” and “people lie”. Well, sometimes execution plans lie. It’s not really by intent, but it is sometimes difficult (or impossible) to represent everything in a query execution tree in nice tabular format like dbms_xplan gives. One of the optimizations that was introduced...

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Oracle Exadata and Netezza TwinFin Compared – An Engineer’s Analysis

August 10, 2010
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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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The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Set Processing vs Row Processing

July 20, 2010
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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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The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Data Loading

April 23, 2010
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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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The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Parallel Execution

April 19, 2010
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The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Parallel Execution

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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The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Partitioning

January 25, 2010
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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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The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Table Compression

January 19, 2010
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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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The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Balanced Hardware Configuration

December 22, 2009
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The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Balanced Hardware Configuration

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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The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Introduction

December 14, 2009
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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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Oracle Parallel Execution: Interconnect Myths And Misunderstandings

July 6, 2009
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Oracle Parallel Execution: Interconnect Myths And Misunderstandings

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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Exadata Snippits From Oracle F4Q09 Earnings Call

June 23, 2009
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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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