One of the easiest ways to understand something is to see a visualization. Looking at Active Session History (ASH) data is no exception and I’ll dive into how to do so with R and how I used R plots to visually present a problem and confirm a hypothesis. But first some background… Background Frequently...
A few weeks back one of the Vertica developers put up a blog post on counting triangles in an undirected graph with reciprocal edges. The author was comparing the size of the data and the elapsed times to run this calculation on Hadoop and Vertica and put up the work on github and encouraged...
I’ve seen some posts on the blogosphere where people attempt to explain (or should I say guess) how Exadata Smart Flash Logging works and most of them are wrong. Hopefully this post will help clear up some the misconceptions out there. The following is an excerpt from the paper entitled “Exadata Smart Flash Cache...
I was just watching John Rauser’s keynote “What is a Career in Big Data?” from last weeks Strata Conference New York and I have to say it’s an amazing talk. I would highly recommended it to anyone who does any type of data analysis, including any type of performance analysis. I found many of...
In addition, here are some OLTP demos that demonstrate how much performance and throughput can be wasted by poor design and suboptimal database programming. OLTP Performance – The Trouble with Parsing OLTP Performance – Concurrent Mid-Tier Connections
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...