The Biggest Gap In The Clouds? High Performance RDBMS

A hurricane representing the performance storm facing high-performance RDBMS workloads that cloud infrastructure was not designed to handle

Hyperscalers have solved cloud infrastructure for most workloads. High-performance RDBMS remains the exception – the gap between cloud promises and database reality is still real.

Oracle ASM and Thin Provisioning – How To Reclaim Space

Thin provisioning lets storage arrays report more capacity than they physically have – but Oracle ASM doesn't automatically return space when data is deleted. Here's how to reclaim it.

Was I Mentioned During Oracle’s Q4 2015 Results Call?

In a proud moment for me, it appears that Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, has mentioned my flashdba blog during the Oracle Q4 2015 results call. At least, that's what I'm reading into this section from the transcript published by Seeking Alpha: We grew in storage in the quarter and this is -- really we are … Continue reading Was I Mentioned During Oracle’s Q4 2015 Results Call? →

The Great Hypervisor Bake-off: VMware ESX vs Oracle VM

SLOB benchmark results measuring the I/O overhead of virtualisation on Violin flash – comparing VMware ESX against Oracle VM to see which hypervisor costs less in raw database performance.

ASM Rebalance Too Slow? 3 Tips To Improve Rebalance Times

Slow ASM rebalance operations usually come down to a handful of overlooked settings. Here are three practical fixes that have dramatically cut rebalance times in real customer environments.

Oracle Exadata X5: The Road To Ten Billion Dollars

Now that the dust has settled on the announcement of Oracle's new Exadata X5 Database Machine, I've been doing some research in order to update my History of Exadata post (it'll be ready soon). While reviewing the datasheets and other collateral for the X5 I was struck by the meteoric increase in one particular statistic: the … Continue reading Oracle Exadata X5: The Road To Ten Billion Dollars →

Oracle AWR Reports: When IOStats Lie

Something is wrong with how Oracle tracks I/O statistics in AWR – here's the reproducible anomaly, the evidence it's real and the investigation into what causes it.

Oracle AWR Reports: When Averages Lie

An ERP database showing intermittent slowdowns looked fine in AWR – because AWR averages hide latency spikes. Here's why averages mislead and what to look at instead.

Oracle, Parallelism and Direct Path Reads… on Flash

Oracle's parallel query engine behaves differently on flash than on spinning disk – direct path reads change the picture in ways that DBAs tuning for traditional storage won't expect.