Understanding Disk: Superpowers

Close-up of a hard disk drive platter showing the magnetic storage surface

Disk drives displaced tape by giving the read/write head the freedom to move – trading sequential dominance for random I/O capability. Understanding that physical design is where disk's performance story begins.

The Most Expensive CPUs You Own

Gold-coloured CPU processor chip representing the hidden cost of database software licensing per core

Storage for DBAs: Take a look in your data centre at all those humming boxes and flashing lights. Ignore the storage and networking gear for now and just concentrate on the servers. You probably have many different models, with different types and numbers of CPUs and DRAM inside. My question is, which CPUs are the most … Continue reading The Most Expensive CPUs You Own →

OOW13: The Future Is Here (Just Don’t Mention “Legacy”)

Last week I attended Oracle OpenWorld 2013 in the stunning city of San Francisco, along with 60,000 other attendees. At times it felt like we'd taken over the entire city, with every street, bus, billboard and hotel plastered in Oracle logos and pictures of engineered systems... although apparently there was some other stuff going on … Continue reading OOW13: The Future Is Here (Just Don’t Mention “Legacy”) →

The Real Cost of Oracle RAC

Pile of gold and silver coins representing the escalating license cost of Oracle RAC

Oracle RAC is sold as a high-availability solution, but its real cost – in licenses, complexity and the hidden assumption that losing a node doesn’t count as an outage – is rarely made explicit.

The Real Cost of Enterprise Database Software

Fanned stack of US dollar bills representing the high cost of enterprise database software licensing

Oracle database licensing is eye-wateringly expensive per CPU core – and storage costs, often seen as prohibitive, represent a surprisingly small fraction of the total three-year spend.

Storage Myths: Put Oracle Redo on SSD

Close-up of a tortoise, symbolising the slow write performance of SSDs for Oracle redo logs

Putting Oracle redo logs on SSD is a common reflex response to slow databases – but it usually misdiagnoses the problem, and SSDs handle write-heavy sequential workloads worse than you might expect.

7 Steps to Guarantee People Will Read Your Posts

I see this type of article pop up all the time on places link LinkedIn and SlideShare. Here's my response... Choose an arbitrary number of items, e.g. 7 Combine this with a suitable noun that the number will describe, e.g. steps, tips, ways, methods etc Make sure you put this combination at the start of … Continue reading 7 Steps to Guarantee People Will Read Your Posts →

Storage Myths: IOPS Matter

Person shouting the word IOPS, illustrating the storage industry's obsession with the metric

IOPS figures dominate flash storage marketing, but for databases latency is the metric that matters – high IOPS at unpredictable latency deliver no real-world value.

The Role Of The DBA

I'm back at work today after a week's travelling around Europe followed by a week's holiday sailing around the Ionian Sea. I have to say that I'd rather still be on holiday. It's not that I don't enjoy my job (I love it) but... Today, I need to install some database software - and it … Continue reading The Role Of The DBA →

SLOB2: Testing The Effect Of Oracle Blocksize

I recently posted a test harness for generating physical I/O using the new version of SLOB (the Silly Little Oracle Benchmark) known as SLOBv2. This test harness can be used for driving varying workloads and then processing the results for use in ... well, wherever really. Some friends of mine are getting very adept with … Continue reading SLOB2: Testing The Effect Of Oracle Blocksize →