One of the results of my employment history is that I tend to take particular interest in the goings on at a certain enterprise software (and hardware!) company based in Redwood Shores. I love watching Oracle's announcements, press releases, product releases and financial statements to see what they are up to - and I am … Continue reading Oracle Exadata X4 (Part 1): Bigger Than It Looks?
Category: Storage
Storage is the foundation on which database performance is built. Latency, throughput, and consistency at this layer directly shape how systems behave under load.
While often abstracted away in modern architectures, storage characteristics continue to define the limits of what databases can achieve – especially as workloads become more demanding and less predictable.
Storage Myths: Storage Compression Has No Downside
Storage-level compression trades capacity for CPU cycles and read latency – understanding that trade-off matters more than the headline reduction ratios vendors put in their datasheets.
Storage Myths: Dedupe for Databases
Data deduplication promises capacity savings, but databases are one of the worst use cases for it – the technology’s assumptions break down against the entropy and I/O patterns of database workloads.
Understanding Disk: Over-Provisioning
When performance capacity drives storage decisions, waste is the inevitable result – stranded terabytes, short-stroking, and a growing gap between what disk holds and what it can actually deliver.
Understanding Disk: Mechanical Limitations
Spinning disk hit its performance ceiling at 15k RPM over two decades ago – and physics, aerodynamics and economics mean it’s staying there. The consequences for latency are unavoidable.
Understanding Disk: Superpowers
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
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
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
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.
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