The Oracle Exadata: latest Business Weapon

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Sorry I’ve been having a lot of work installing, maintaining and migrating to Database Machines all over Latinamerica for the latest 10 months; that means lot of travels abroad, all of them very exciting, but the real excitement comes from my job working with this wonderful Machine.

Was on the last project when realized how important is this investment for our customers, having this big caribbean Telco installed their first Exadata and later migrated their databases meant for them dramatic performance improvements and the ability to get more up-to-date analytical information and compete better and more agile.

Of course the Database Machine fulfilled expectations when we achieved a processing reduction of 6x on their nightly batch processes, going from 8-9hrs processing time, down-to 1.5-2hrs processing time. What this means: now they’re able to increase the refreshing time of their analysis tools 12 times a day and on demand, instead of having latest information one day behind.

Read my related article on Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression

My steps to implement EHCC

Recommended reading on My Oracle Support notes that helped make this happen:

Migrating to Oracle Exadata Storage Server Paper (PDF)

Oracle Sun Database Machine Performance Best Practices [ID 1067520.1]

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My Steps to Implement Exadata EHCC

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Last time I was engaged with an Exadata migration, customer asked me about EHCC and how to implement it for their datamarts.

My approach (at that time) consisted on the following:
1) Get a sample of very big objects to play with
2) Used DBMS_COMPRESSION in order to get estimations for compression rates
3) Try every compression type: Basic, Query Low, Query High, Archive Low, Archive High and recorded size reductions, time to import and time for FTS.
4) Recorded and compared timings for various batch processes and important queries

With all those statistics, went to the customer and then he was able to take a decision based on nature of data, popular timeframe of querying within the data window, parallel degree, partitioning defined (BTW customer already had it on place, best practice!), and so on.

I've used Datapump to import because it uses direct path load and Basic compression needs it to kick in.

Further thinking on this matter resulted on proposals to include table usage (V$SEGMENT_STATISTICS) & table data dynamics (Monitoring+DBA_TAB_MODIFICATIONS) in order to fine tune the compression mode selected. The next time I've the opportunity to include this on the process, I'll share with you the results...

Thank you very much for your time, and if you liked this post please share with others freely...



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Oracle Exadata/Database Machine... nice to meet you

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During the last four or five weeks I've had the rare privilege of working with this amazing piece of engineering, the Oracle Database Machine.

Engaged during deployment of it, I've faced the setup steps on the SW side, applied upgrade patches & side-to-side with Oracle Sun engineers bringing this marvel to life... it's just exciting, watching all the slightly-bluish-green leds showing HD activity or admiring the most precise cabling I've ever seen... there is just one word: precision. I remember my first experience with an HP XP12000 SAN, five years ago, being not that exciting as this recent experience.

Few months ago, started my preparation taking a web seminar for Oracle Exadata, appeared to me quite revolutionary the way it works, had to admit that first perception quickly got surpassed once started working directly with this beauty.

A new paradigma is needed when working with Exadata, it's clear the tuning role will change, one (for instance) that may consider an index useless or even harmful.

Please stay with me on this exciting journey, I'll try to share my experience on this as much as I can. Thank you for your attention.

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