The Fundamental Characteristics of Storage

Storage for DBAs: As a rule of thumb, pretty much any storage system can be characterised by three fundamental properties: Latency is a measurement of delay in a system; so in the case of storage it is the time taken to respond to an I/O request. It's a term which is frequently misused - more … Continue reading The Fundamental Characteristics of Storage →

Performance: It’s All About Balance…

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… →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Auto DOP with High Performance Storage

Guest Post Nate Fuzi is my friend and collegue, based out in the US fulfilling the same role that I perform in EMEA. He is also the person with which I have drunk more sake jello shots than I ever thought probable / sensible / acceptable. Nate recently wrote this note regarding the use of … Continue reading Auto DOP with High Performance Storage →

The Ultimate Guide To Oracle Support

In an effort to provide useful content rather than just blathering on about stuff I've written an article on how to work with and understand Oracle Support. The idea is that if you know the way the organisation works, you can get the best out of your experiences with them. Nothing in the article is … Continue reading The Ultimate Guide To Oracle Support →

Why In-Memory Computing Needs Flash

You might be tempted to think that In-Memory technologies and flash are concepts which have no common ground. After all, if you can run everything in memory, why worry about the performance of your storage? However, the truth is very different: In-Memory needs flash to reach its true potential. Here I will discuss why and … Continue reading Why In-Memory Computing Needs Flash →