September 2014

Despite the title, this is actually a technical post about Oracle, disk I/O and Exadata & Oracle In-Memory Database Option performance. Read on :)

If a car dealer tells you that this fancy new car on display goes 10 times (or 100 or 1000) faster than any of your previous ones, then either the salesman is lying or this new car is doing something radically different from all the old ones. You don’t just get orders of magnitude performance improvements by making small changes.

Perhaps the car bends space around it instead of moving – or perhaps it has a jet engine built on it (like the one below :-) :

I started looking into In-Memory on RAC this week. Data can be distributed across RAC nodes in a couple of different ways. The default is to spread it across the available nodes in the cluster. So if you had a 2 node cluster, roughly 50% of the data in your table or partition would be loaded into the column store in each of the 2 instances.

Monday Sept 29 and Tuesday Sept 30, same location as last year.

This post looks like I am jumping on the bandwagon of IT orchestration like a lot of people are doing. Maybe I should say ‘except for (die hard) Oracle DBA’s’. Or maybe not, it up to you to decide.

Most people who are interested in IT in general will have noticed IT orchestration has gotten attention, especially in the form of Puppet and/or Chef. I _think_ IT orchestration has gotten important with the rise of “web scale” (scaling up and down applications by adding virtual machines to horizontal scale resource intensive tasks), in order to provision/configure the newly added machines without manual intervention, and people start picking it up now to use it for more tasks than provisioning of virtual machines for web applications.