Posted by Marc Fielding on Dec 2, 2011
I was just looking at an Exadata X2-2 ordering document and noticed that it included 144GB of RAM. The sales rep pointed at the Exadata X2-2 datasheet and showed the 96GB to 144GB memory expansion option. Based on my reading of Intel Xeon (Nehalam) memory configurations, as long as each channel has a single dual-ranked module, all the memory can run at full 1333MHz speed. (Update: as noted in the comments, this is unfortunately not the case in Exadata; with the expansion unit memory runs at 800MHz). It populates the normally-empty third socket for each memory bank with an additional memory module.
It isn’t particularly cheap: $6250 per database node at US list price, but is a performance booster that doesn’t have ongoing support costs either. For OLTP environments, I like to say cache is still king, and even for those of you with pure data warehouses, 50% more PGA space can help out your sorts too.
And yes, I realize this isn’t particularly new; according to Kerry Osborne’s blog it came out (but wasn’t officially announced per se) at the same time as the storage expansion racks in the summer
Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Nov 16, 2011
Pythian continues to have a busy quarter with events right up to the end of the 2011 calendar year.
If you happened to miss us at a past event, email events@pythian.com to reconnect or request a copy of the any of the presentations we’ve made through 2011 or earlier.
Live events
Web events
Posted by Michael S. Abbey on Nov 14, 2011
The presentation deadline for UKOUG is 8 days away. I have been madly preparing for 2 presentations, one on my best friend (rman) and the other on my co-best friend (the physical standby). Both of these topics have been perennial favourites for me and many of my attendees. I find with both of these items, there is always something more to learn.
Pythian has quite the presence at the UKOUG show in Birmingham England the first full week of December. I fondly remember my first trip to Europe to attend the show in Brighton in 1992. I was traveling with a senior exec from Oracle and we stayed in a very posh hotel and naturally went first class on the train to Brighton. My first day in London was, as I had heard, a typical London day:
- raining
- jumper at Green Park
- small explosion at Victoria Park station
- coal miners’ march
What more could I ask for. I was there again in 1998 for the show once it had permanently re-located to Birmingham. One of my topics this year allowed me to hone my skills with the active database duplicate in 11g. Talk about a sweet piece of technology :). I have been around IT for 25 or so years and this is one of the best I have seen. Speaking of rman … if you are lucky enough to be using it with Enterprise Edition and multi-CPU boxes (do any single-CPU boxes still exist?), the speed of the product is huge when asking it to spawn multiple channels manually or setting a degree of parallelism. Kudos to the engineers/developers who put that together.
I hunger for the opportunity to cut my teeth on some of the new-fangled stuff coming from Oracle … especially Exa-this and Exa-that not to mention ODA. I consider myself to be a strong CORE DBA and take pride in the work I do in that arena. Is it possible to teach an old dog new tricks?
While at the Apple store recently I shared a “secret” with the folks at the Genius bar to the pleasure of yours truly and the woman I was working with … want to boot Lion on Mac in 32-bit mode? Hold the 3 and the 2 key when restarting the machine. I wonder if I held down the 1 and the 9 key if it would boot in 19-bit mode :).
By the way, to my amazement I did see something once when flying into London … London! Usually it is overcast and you can’t see anything until your plane drops through a very low cloud cover. I thought I saw David Gilmour walking out of Harrod’s from seat 22F on my Boeing 767 but am still not sure.
Posted by Gwen Shapira on Oct 18, 2011
Automatic degree of parallelism, or Auto DOP, is a new feature in 11gR2 that promises to help manage systems where large subset of the workload runs with parallel processing. In this post I’ll introduce the feature and give very useful tips I got from Oracle’s Real World Performance expert Greg Rahn on how to use it. So this is worth reading even if you are familiar with the feature.
The problem is fairly well known – you system only has finite amount of resources. Only so many CPUs, only so many disks capable of delivering only so many IO/s and MB/s. A certain query may have amazing performance when running with 32 parallel processes all alone on your test system. When 5 people need to run it at once, and at the same time there are two scheduled jobs running each with its own parallel processes, there are two likely outcomes:
- You will run more parallel processes than your system is capable of serving. Resulting in long queues on the CPU and storage, and overall performance degradation.
- You limit the maximum number of parallel processes to protect the database resources, and some of the queries degrade. If you don’t detect it, the ETL process that should have finished in two hours takes 24, which means that the daily report sent to the CEO is missing some of the data. Ouch.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Marc Fielding on Oct 5, 2011
The website for Oracle Database Cloud Services at cloud.oracle.com is now online, in conjunction with Larry Ellison’s announcement during the Oracle OpenWorld keynote going on now. It’s a hosted database service running Oracle 11gR2. The database can be accessed using a hosted Oracle application server, via JDBC across the Internet, or their own RESTful API a la Amazon. Notably lacking is Oracle’s own TNS network protocol.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Marc Fielding on Oct 4, 2011
Update 7-October-2011: the log write caching capability has been officially announced as “Exadata Smart Flash Log”. I saw a few Oracle product management slides at OpenWorld presentations; one slide deck online is here on slide 30. A sample graph is provided, showing how the peak response times drop significantly with the additional cache.
These peaks would correspond to the times when the controller RAM cache is full. Another feature of the cache is that it returns write success status to the database when either flash or disk controller acknowledge the write, meaning tat the flash memory functions as a type of upper bound to redo write latency.
Exadata storage server software version 11.2.2.4.0 (patch link) has just been released. The readme file (My Oracle Support login required) lists 218 different changes, but one in particular sticks out:
11781936 NEED SMART FLASH LOGGING OF RDBMS REDO
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Gwen Shapira on Oct 4, 2011
Oracle announced the Big Data Appliance on Monday morning keynote. Many people, me included, were long waiting for this to happen. Others didn’t think it will ever happen. So naturally, there is a lot of buzz and excitement around the new device in Open World. The keynote announcement was very short on details and certainly did not satisfy my technical curiosity. So I went to a few presentations to hear what exactly is included in the offering.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Oct 3, 2011
Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA) is being announced at the Oracle OpenWorld keynote as I’m posting this. It will take some time for it to be actually available for shipment and some details will likely change but here is what we have so far about Oracle Big Data Appliance.
A rack with InfiniBand, full of 2U servers similar to Exadata Storage. No flash storage needed so couple sockets and a dozen of disks will do. Maybe more ram than Exadata storage cells themselves. I suspect you could have as many servers as you want in a configuration but since Hadoop clusters are usually dozens and more nodes, full rack seems reasonable with about 20 Hadoop compute nodes to start with. Real deployments should easily go into multiple racks stacked together.
Low latency, high bandwidth communication is critical for fast data loading and later data processing with Hadoop so InfiniBand will be there — same Exadata/Exalogic-like platform.
Oracle should also have its own NoSQL engine — Oracle NoSQL Database. If you know existing Oracle products, Berkley DB seems to be a reasonable foundation to power Oracle’s new NoSQL engine.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Oct 3, 2011
PYTHIAN NEWS
Live from Oracle OpenWorld Pythian is thrilled to share news of our big win: Oracle North America Titan Award for Oracle Exadata solution that was planned, deployed and is currently managed for online marketing corporation LinkShare in New York.
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Sep 29, 2011
Many analysts are suggesting that a big data appliance will be announced at this OOW. Based on published Oracle OpenWorld focus sessions on oracle.com (PDF documents), the following technologies will most likely be the key — Hadoop, NoSQL, Hadoop data loader for Oracle, R Language.
Want more details — you have to wait for them. This page contained some details but they moved here.
