Performance

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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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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In catching up on blog posts I see that Jonathan Lewis, Christian Antognini and Nuno Souto picked up on the deferred segment creation new feature in Oracle 11gR2. In keeping with the theme, I thought I’d put together the top 10 new features in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) that I consider significant....
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Even though Oracle OpenWorld 2009 is a few months away, I thought I would take a moment to mention that the Oracle Real-World Performance Group will again be hosting three sessions. Hopefully you are no stranger to our Oracle database performance sessions and this year we have what I think will be a very...
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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 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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