Oracle
We’re in the process of applying Exadata Bundle Patch 5, and ran into an issue I wanted to share.The system didn’t have a XDB user, and likely because of this, the two “alter package” commands invalidated the dbms_metadata objects. The subsequent recompilations all failed. On advice from Oracle support, we ended up backing out the patch and re-applying without running these “alter package” commands, and confirmed that DBMS_METADATA works fine. So if you don’t have XDB installed, skip the “alter package” commands. I hope the README is updated soon.
My article Making the Most of Oracle Exadata in the August 2010 issue of the NoCOUG Journal has come out. It covers Exadata’s feature set, and then dives deeper, discussing how to make the best use of its capabilities. For those of you not subscribers of the print edition, it’s also available electronically.
If you’re attending Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco, Sept. 19-23, 2010, be sure to stop by one of Pythian’s many sessions. We’ll be all over the show, with experts Alex, and Marc speaking as listed below. Or, you might find Paul, Alex and others attending the bloggers meetup, participating in Oracle ACE/ACE Director activities, or at some of the User Group or OPN sessions on Sunday. Drop us a line on twitter @pythian while you’re at the show to connect with Pythian.
At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. In that session, there was a section on how to determine I/O throughput for a system, because in data warehousing I/O per second (iops) is less important than I/O throughput (how much actual data goes through, not just how many reads/writes).
I’ll be giving a webinar about Exadata implementation, where I’ll be talking about Exadata features and how best to use them. I’ll also be sharing some lessons learned from my own implementation experience. The webinar will be on Wednesday August 11 at high noon eastern time. Note that this is a change from the previous date.
After covering hardware components of Sun Oracle Database Machine in part 1, our grand tour continues with a look at the software side. With the prominent exceptions of the Exadata storage server software and the Oracle database itself, the software stack is based on well-known and widely used open source products.
Although many electrons have been expended discussing Exadata’s features, storage indexes tend to figure last, with a vague mention of row elimination in heavily clustered data. Even Oracle’s Exadata software user guide devotes barely half a page to them. Unlike the better known smart scanning features though, storage indexes have an important advantage: rather than offloading workload to storage cells, they eliminate the need to do the I/O at all. Here are some sample statistics taken from an actual production system:
I hear lots of feedback on Exadata front asking for more and more technical information and I often refer them to some material online. I think I should reference couple credible resources for the readers of our blog in addition to our own Exadata content and Oracle’s own Exadata Technology section.
The Pythian Group Inc., the preeminent remote database infrastructure services company and a Platinum member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) today announced the implementation of the Sun Oracle Database Machine at LinkShare Corporation, a division of Rakuten, Inc, and launch of its Oracle Exadata services practice.
In this series of articles (part 2 here and part 3 here), we’ll explore the major components of Exadata and the Oracle Database Machine and take a peek at how they’re designed with performance and scalability in mind.
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