Structured Data

Preprocessor For External Tables

Greg Rahn — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:00:42 +0000

Before External Tables existed in the Oracle database, loading from flat files was done via SQL*Loader. One option that some used was to have a compressed text file and load it with SQL*Loader via a named pipe. This allowed one not to have to extract the file, which could be several times the [...]

Oracle Exadata: In Response to Chuck Hollis

Greg Rahn — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:17:15 +0000

Chuck Hollis, VP and Global Marketing CTO at EMC has written a couple blog posts offering his thoughts on Oracle Exadata. The first was “Oracle Does Hardware” which he wrote the day after the product launch. The second, unimpressively titled “I Annoy Kevin Closson at Oracle” was on Monday October 20th which was [...]

DBMS_STATS, METHOD_OPT and FOR ALL INDEXED COLUMNS

Greg Rahn — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:00:26 +0000

I’ve written before on choosing an optimal stats gathering strategy but I recently came across a scenario that I didn’t directly blog about and think it deserves attention. As I mentioned in that previous post, one should only deviate from the defaults when they have a reason to, and fully understand that reason and [...]

11.1.0.7 Patch Set For Oracle Database Server

Greg Rahn — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:50:14 +0000

This week (on Tuesday I believe) the 11.1.0.7 patch set for Oracle Database Server was released for for the “big 3″ Unix platforms as I call them: Sun Solaris SPARC 64, HP-UX Itanium, and IBM AIX 64-bit. The patchset number is 6890831 and is available for download from Metalink.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Recap

Greg Rahn — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:41:55 +0000

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 is now in the books and it surely was a busy and exciting one. The launch of Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine was the highlight for me and I hope for many of you as well. Real-World Performance Group Presentations This year the Real-World Performance Group did three [...]

Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine

Greg Rahn — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 08:00:16 +0000

If you haven’t been under a rock you know that Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine at Oracle OpenWorld 2008. There seems to be quite a bit of interest and excitement about the product and I for one will say that I am extremely excited about [...]

Extreme Buzz About Oracle OpenWorld

Greg Rahn — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:00:49 +0000

Last week I read Mark Rittman’s post and today I was reading this InfoWorld article and a few others that are speculating what will be the big news this year at Oracle OpenWorld. I guess the first teaser was given out by Larry Ellison on the F4Q08 earnings call on June 25: We have a major database [...]

Data Warehouse Appliances: Conflicting Stories

Greg Rahn — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 05:02:40 +0000

I usually stick to the technical stuff but today is strictly about entertainment. One has to laugh when a company (Tesco) is involved in two press releases in two days with two different database vendors and the press releases are a bit conflicting. I’d say this appears to be a case of open [...]

Understanding Performance

Greg Rahn — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:50:40 +0000

There has been some debate in forumsphere/blogosphere centered around Steve Karam’s observation of a 20x elapsed time difference in an update statement “by only changing the block size”. At this point in time, it is pretty much understood (I hope) that this performance delta is directly related to bug 6918210. This bug manifests [...]

Automatic DB_FILE_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT

Greg Rahn — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:00:39 +0000

Note: Originally this experiment was from a post I wrote on the Oracle Forum: Database - General. I recommend that you read Jonathan Lewis’ summarization of the thread instead of reading all 671 posts (as of today). You will spend much less time and get more out of the discussion. One of the [...]