For those who followed or attended Oracle OpenWorld last week you may have seen the introduction of the new hardware for the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Here’s a high level summary of what was introduced: Updated Exadata Storage Server nodes (based on the Sun Fire X4270 M2) Updated 2 socket 12 core database nodes for the...
11.2.0.2 Patch Set For Oracle Database Server
Update: Mon Sep 13 16:02:36 PDT 2010 The 11.2.0.2 patch is now available for download (for real). If you downloaded it on Friday, there is no need to re-download it. It was mistakenly made public before it could be validated (test MD5 sums, etc.), but has since been validated. Enjoy! Just a quick post...
Oracle OpenWorld 2010: Sessions By OakTable Members
As Oracle OpenWorld is just around the corner and you are probably getting your session schedule together, I thought I’d pass on this (nearly complete) list of sessions of which one or more of the presenters is an OakTable member. There is no doubt in my mind that these sessions will contain some of...
Oracle Exadata and Netezza TwinFin Compared – An Engineer’s Analysis
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...
New Outfit, New Style
Back on June 17th WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” was released and it offered up a handful of new features. Just a few days ago (July 29th) the 3.0.1 release went GA so I decided it was time to investigate what the new 3.0 ready themes had to offer. After looking through a handful of themes...
The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Set Processing vs Row Processing
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...
Oracle OpenWorld 2010: The Oracle Real-World Performance Group
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...
Fully Exploiting Exadata
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...
10.2.0.5 Patch Set For Oracle Database Server
Just a quick post that the 10.2.0.5 patch set for Oracle Database Server was released for x86 & x86-64 platforms on April 29th. The patchset number is 8202632 and is available for download from My Oracle Support.
The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Data Loading
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...
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...
The Core Performance Fundamentals Of Oracle Data Warehousing – Partitioning
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...