What Every CIO Wants

Some weeks ago I was fortunate enough to read a preview copy of Stephen O'Donnell's book What Every CIO Wants: A Guide for Global Technology Sales People. Steve is, amongst other things, the Chairman of the Industry Advisory Board for Violin Memory, as well as being the former Global Head of Data Centre Operations for … Continue reading What Every CIO Wants →

SLOB on Violin 3000 Series with Infiniband

Last week I invited Martin Bach to the Violin Memory EMEA headquarters to do some testing on both our 3000 and 6000 series arrays. Martin was very interested in seeing how the Violin flash memory arrays performed, having already had some experience with PCIe-based flash card vendor. There are a few problems with PCIe flash … Continue reading SLOB on Violin 3000 Series with Infiniband →

Exadata Re-Racking Service

I've heard from a few sources now that Oracle is offering a new Exadata Re-racking service for quarter and half racks. The idea, as I understand it, is that if you have your own rack equipment in your data centre and don't want to use the rack that Exadata comes preinstalled in, you can pay … Continue reading Exadata Re-Racking Service →

SLOB testing on Violin and Exadata

I love SLOB, the Silly Little Oracle Benchmark introduced to me by Kevin Closson in his blog. I love it because it's so simple to setup and use. Benchmarking tools such as Hammerora have their place of course, but let's say you've just got your hands on an Exadata X2-8 machine and want to see … Continue reading SLOB testing on Violin and Exadata →

The History of Exadata

I've been working on a timeline for the history of Exadata, starting with the HP Oracle Database Machine and working through to the X2 series. It's interesting to see how Oracle's presentation of the product has changed over time, particularly the marketing messages. Also, if you didn't know better you would probably think that Engineered … Continue reading The History of Exadata →

Oracle minimises the Exadata minimal pack

As of Exadata Storage Software version 11.2.3.1 released in March 2012 the "minimal pack" has now been deprecated. This is a component of the storage server software patch which is actually applied to the database servers in order to bring them up to the same image version. Those who have been patching Exadata for a … Continue reading Oracle minimises the Exadata minimal pack →

ASM Metadata Utilities

One of the things I meant to write about when I started this blog was the undocumented stuff in Oracle that is publicly available. Since I used to spend a lot of time working with ASM I had an idea that I would write an article about kfed, the kernel file editor used to query … Continue reading ASM Metadata Utilities →

Oracle on Violin – Installation Cookbooks

I've been installing Oracle databases on Violin Memory a lot recently so I thought I'd document the process for each different flavour and combination of OS, kernel, database software and filesystem / ASM configuration that I use. Only one so far but the menu will grow...

Analysing Oracle Exadata

I've been working on a document recently which describes Exadata and examines its strengths and weaknesses. I have uploaded a number of the sections of the document as pages to this site - they are listed as tabs under the Oracle Exadata menu here.