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 amount of discussion about the Oracle Database with Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Oracle Exadata. Both of these vendor papers are well structured but make no mistake, these are marketing publications written with the intent to be critical of Exadata and discuss how their product is potentially better. Hence, both of these papers are obviously biased to support their purpose. My intent with this blog post is simply to discuss some of the claims, analyze them for factual accuracy, and briefly comment on them. After all, Netezza clearly states in their publication: The information shared in this paper is made available in the spirit of openness. Any inaccuracies result from our mistakes, not an intent to mislead. In the interest of full disclosure, my employer is Oracle Corporation, however, this is a personal blog and what I write here are my own ideas and words (see [...]

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 I decided to give the Magazine Basic theme a try for now. It offered a 1024 pixel wide layout and threaded comments; two of the features I was really looking for.  Feel free to share your comments: good, bad or otherwise.  Thanks! Here is a capture of the previous version just in case you don’t recall what it looked like (click for full size).

[back to Introduction] 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 similar.  The reason these are so problematic is that developers have hard-coded “slow” into them.  I’m generally certain these developers didn’t know they had done this when they coded their PL/SQL, but none the less it happened. So How Did “Slow” Get Hard-Coded Into My PL/SQL? Generally “slow” gets hard-coded into PL/SQL because the PL/SQL developer(s) took the business requirements and did a “literal translation” of each rule/requirement one at a time instead of looking at the “before picture” and the “after picture” and determining the most efficient way to make those data changes.  Many times this can surface as cursor based row-by-row processing, but it also can appear as PL/SQL just running a series of often poorly thought out SQL commands. Hard-Coded Slow Case Study The following is based on a true story. Only the facts names have been changed to protect the innocent. Here is [...]

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 see and hear Oracle Database performance insight right from Oracle’s own performance engineers.  Hope to see you there! And for those who are interested, there will likely be many discussions about the Oracle Database Machine and Oracle Exadata.  Very hot stuff! Session ID: S317164 (Monday 2:00PM) Session Title: The Latest Real World Performance Challenges Session Abstract: Oracle’s Real-World Performance Group — the group that first presented at Oracle OpenWorld parallel query techniques with partitions, the index-less database, cardinality challenges with the optimizer, over-processed databases and connection storms — this year presents the performance issues before you experience them and how to plan for future projects with success. All topics discussed in this session come from the Real-World Performance Group’s observations and problem solving. Session ID: S317166 (Monday 5:00PM) Session Title: Real-World Performance Panel Session Session Abstract: This session is your chance, via written questions, to ask a [...]

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 there is often significant performance that is left on the table just waiting to be fully exploited — the kind of performance that really makes a database performance engineer excited — mind blowing performance. This includes, but is not limited to, data model changes, SQL query modifications and re-engineering batch processes. The reason these types of modifications get me so excited is that design decisions are often influenced by the then current deployment platform and with the Exadata powered Oracle Database Machine those restrictions are frequently lifted. You see, with Exadata the rules change, and so should your design decisions. Sure, you could just pluck-and-plop an existing Oracle data warehouse database onto an Oracle Database Machine and it would likely run much faster than it does on your current system, and you will be wowed, but you very well may shouting four letter expletives describing how [...]