Storage For DBAs: Everyone wants their stuff to go faster. Whether it's your laptop, tablet, phone, database or application... performance is one of the most desirable characteristics of any system. If your system isn't fast enough, you start dreaming of more. Maybe you try and tune what you already have, or maybe you upgrade to … Continue reading Performance: It’s All About Balance…
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New Blog Series: Storage For DBAs
When I joined Violin I suddenly realised that I was going to be in a minority... a DBA in a world of storage people. DBAs don't always think about storage - in fact I think it's fair to say that many DBAs would prefer to keep storage at arm's length. It's just disk, right? Of … Continue reading New Blog Series: Storage For DBAs
Using SLOB to Test Physical I/O
For some time now I've been using the Silly Little Oracle Benchmark (SLOB) tool to drive physical I/O against the various high performance flash memory arrays I have in my lab (one of the benefits of working for Violin Memory is a lab stuffed with flash arrays!) I wrote a number of little scripts and … Continue reading Using SLOB to Test Physical I/O
Inserting Formatted Code into WordPress
A lot of people I know use WordPress.com, including me for this blog. One of the common complaints I hear is that it's not easy to insert formatted text such as source code or, in my case, snippets from Oracle AWR Reports. I don't have a problem with this, because I have developed a way … Continue reading Inserting Formatted Code into WordPress
AWR Generator
As part of my role at Violin I spend a lot of time profiling customer's databases to see how their performance varies over time. The easiest way to do this (since I often don't have remote access) is to ask for lots of AWR reports. One single report covering a large span of time is … Continue reading AWR Generator
Engineered Systems – An Alternative View
Have you seen the press recently? Or passed through an airport and seen the massive billboards advertising IT companies? I have - and I've learnt something from them: Engineered Systems are the best thing ever. I also know this because I read it on the Oracle website... and on the IBM website, although IBM likes … Continue reading Engineered Systems – An Alternative View
New Installation Cookbook
Short post to mention that I've added another installation cookbook to the set published here. This one falls into the Advanced Cookbook section and covers installation on Oracle Linux 6.3 with Oracle 11.2.0.3 single-instance and 4k ASM, paying special attention to the configuration of UDEV and the multipathing software. The blog posts haven't been coming … Continue reading New Installation Cookbook
Oracle VM 3.1.1 with Violin Memory storage
As part of the Installation Cookbook series I have now posted a new entry on how to install Oracle VM with Violin Memory flash storage: Oracle VM 3.1.1 with Violin Memory storage
The Standard Tech Industry Sales Pitch
The tech industry is full of people, companies and organisations that want your attention, your custom and your money. There are so many of them out there it's mind-boggling - so how does one go about standing out from the crowd? The winners are the ones that can differentiate themselves from the rest - the ones that … Continue reading The Standard Tech Industry Sales Pitch
Database Workload Theory
In the scientific world, theoretical physicists postulate theories and ideas, for example the Higgs Boson. After this, experimental physicists design and implement experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider, to prove or disprove these theories. In this post I'm going to try and do the same thing with databases, except on a smaller budget, with less … Continue reading Database Workload Theory
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