Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Oracle Optimized Warehouse Initiative (OWI)
I enjoyed a trip out of the office today with my manager. We went down to the Oracle Enterprise Technology Centre, in Reading, to hear about the Oracle Optimized Warehouse Initiative. It was basically a half day pitch from Oracle and Sun today, although there are other dates with different hardware vendors (IBM, HP and Dell).
It was an interesting day, although I didn't really hear anything new, per se. I think the main things I took away from the session were:
It was interesting to hear about the Proof Of Concept facility that Sun has, in Linlithgow, Scotland. The facility allows Sun (and an Oracle customer) to take a server off the production line and, working with the customer, test their workload on that machine to see if it's going to work or not. Neat, and since we're going to be using some Sun kit for a DW shortly, it sounds like an opportunity.
Funniest thing of the day for me, was the last slide in the pitch given by Mike Leigh of Sun which had the title "The Power of 2" and was illustrating the benefits to customers of Oracle and Sun as a united force. I didn't really take much notice, as I was too busy smiling, as I looked at the title and it made me think of Doug and his Parallel Execution and the 'Magic of 2' paper (the Magic of 2 bit actually being from this paper by Cary).
If you're building a warehouse, or just want to get an idea of whether your hardware is appropriate for the job, it's probably worth reading up on the OWI.
It was an interesting day, although I didn't really hear anything new, per se. I think the main things I took away from the session were:
- The availability of a set of reference configurations providing matrices which cover various permutations of user count, storage cost focus, warehouse size and hardware vendor.
- The possibility of using the reference configurations either minimally, to simply cross check a proposed hardware specification for a given workload, to ensure it seems appropriate, or going the whole hog and using an "out of the box" reference configuration, delivered to your office, fully configured with all software installed, in a box, ready to run in your data.
- Oracle are pushing RAC and ASM heavily in the DW space - no surprise there.
- HammerOra and ORION are used by Oracle and the hardware vendors to assess the reference configurations...and there is nothing stopping you using them for your own benchmarking efforts
It was interesting to hear about the Proof Of Concept facility that Sun has, in Linlithgow, Scotland. The facility allows Sun (and an Oracle customer) to take a server off the production line and, working with the customer, test their workload on that machine to see if it's going to work or not. Neat, and since we're going to be using some Sun kit for a DW shortly, it sounds like an opportunity.
Funniest thing of the day for me, was the last slide in the pitch given by Mike Leigh of Sun which had the title "The Power of 2" and was illustrating the benefits to customers of Oracle and Sun as a united force. I didn't really take much notice, as I was too busy smiling, as I looked at the title and it made me think of Doug and his Parallel Execution and the 'Magic of 2' paper (the Magic of 2 bit actually being from this paper by Cary).
If you're building a warehouse, or just want to get an idea of whether your hardware is appropriate for the job, it's probably worth reading up on the OWI.
Monday, February 20, 2006
RAC and data warehouses - Are they compatible ?
I watched one of the presentations of the Audio CD from UKOUG Conference 2005 – Getting the most of of RAC on Linux by James Anthony and was interested to see his comments that reducing the block size / reducing the rows per block can help in tuning the interconnect between the instances of a RAC environment.
Basically, James was saying how reducing the number of rows per block, perhaps by reducing the block size or using a higher PCTFREE value, would help to reduce block contention at the cost of using more space. This would in turn make full scans slightly worse but he suggested that full table scans can be hard on a RAC environment anyway and are therefore best avoided….so I’m wondering how a RAC approach fits with a data warehouse, where full scans are reasonably common (albeit with some degree of partition pruning hopefully!) and also where we might use compression, PCTFREE 0 and large block sizes to maximise the rows per block.
It sounds like there might be elements of RAC that don’t fit well with warehousing – but I’m guessing it’s not necessarily black and white and that things can be designed/planned/managed appropriately.
We don’t use RAC on the system I’m working on currently and I’m not particularly experienced with RAC, so if anyone has any opinions I’d be interested to hear them.
Basically, James was saying how reducing the number of rows per block, perhaps by reducing the block size or using a higher PCTFREE value, would help to reduce block contention at the cost of using more space. This would in turn make full scans slightly worse but he suggested that full table scans can be hard on a RAC environment anyway and are therefore best avoided….so I’m wondering how a RAC approach fits with a data warehouse, where full scans are reasonably common (albeit with some degree of partition pruning hopefully!) and also where we might use compression, PCTFREE 0 and large block sizes to maximise the rows per block.
It sounds like there might be elements of RAC that don’t fit well with warehousing – but I’m guessing it’s not necessarily black and white and that things can be designed/planned/managed appropriately.
We don’t use RAC on the system I’m working on currently and I’m not particularly experienced with RAC, so if anyone has any opinions I’d be interested to hear them.
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