Posted by the Database-Geek.

DBAs and developers, do you suffer from PD? PD, performance dysfunction, is not a topic that many like to discuss. A few people do but they mostly hang out together at conferences and talk about the size of their tuples. For the rest of us, PD is an evil, evil thing.

There are as many types of PD as there are causes. Today I want to talk about a particularly insidious type referred to as PO or Premature Optimization. PO can strike at any time, any where. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about but it is something to fix.

I think Phil would say that according to the Oracle page for the database machine:

The HP Oracle Database Machine is a complete system, including software, servers, and storage, designed to run large, multi-terabyte data warehouses 10x faster than conventional data warehouse systems.

Oracle is targeting data warehouses not “normal, everyday usage of Oracle Database.”

Lewis,

Are we comparing apples with apples?

The Oracle database machine seems to me to be a generic machine trying to improve performance for normal, everyday usage of Oracle Database.

Oracle database includes some ROLAP functionality but is not, strictly speaking, a dedicated data warehouse database (cf HOLAP and MOLAP).

Because of this I would not expect the Oracle offering to perform better than the Netezza one. What would Phil Francisco say to this?

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LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology
Are you involved in data warehousing at all? I have been for a long time. One of the things that has always interested me is the Data Warehouse Appliance. I once had the chance to see a demo of an earl…

High Performance MySQL, Second Edition

Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More

By Baron Schwartz , Peter Zaitsev , Vadim Tkachenko , Jeremy Zawodny , Arjen Lentz , Derek J. Balling

Pages: 708

ISBN 10: 0-596-10171-6 | ISBN 13: 9780596101718

When I first read about this book, I figured many sections would be over my head. I was pleasantly surprised when I started reading it.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

According to an article at Computerworld, Yahoo is running a 2 PB (not GB, not TB, PB – Petabyte) database that processes 24 billion events a day. Let’s put that in perspective. 24 billion events is 24,000 million events; 24,000,000,000 events. 1 petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Yahoo has two of those. Actually, I should be basing this on 1k which is 1024 but when you’re dealing with petabytes, I don’t think we need to be picky. We’re talking really, really big.

Yahoo uses this database to analyze the browsing habits of it half a billion monthly visitors.

Postgres 8.3 is out and it contains plenty of new and improved features. Some of my favorites are: sql/xml support, text search, autovacuum improvements, performance improvements (significant) and some additional SQL changes.
You can read the press release.
You can also check out the feature list or review the simpler feature matrix which compares all of the versions since 7.4.
You may also want to read the release notes.
You can read about the release in the press by following along with the discussion at postgresql.org.

postgresql new release

Nifty! Oracle® Database 11g Running on HP with Windows Sets New World Record.

Oracle announced a new world record price/performance result with the TPC-C benchmark running Oracle® Database 11g on Windows. With this result, Oracle now holds the top two record benchmark positions in the coveted Top Ten TPC-C price/performance category. Optimized for small, medium and growing businesses (SMBs), the combination of Oracle Database 11g and Windows on an HP ProLiant server provides an ideal platform to meet these companies’ individual business needs. This benchmark result further demonstrates Oracle’s commitment to providing customers of all sizes unmatched price/performance and scalability.

“Out of the gate, Oracle Database 11g sets a new price/performance bar for the industry and it will continue to excel as it matures,” said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president Systems Technology, Oracle.

Running on an IBM System p 570 with two dual-core 4.7 GHz POWER6 processors, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 achieved 404,462.54 tpmC (transactions per minute) with a price-performance ratio of $3.50/tpmC — a record achievement in 4-core performance.

“This TPC-C benchmark result, as well as those from the recent two-tier SAP SD Benchmarks, reinforces Oracle Database 10g’s performance and scalability leadership,” said Juan Loaiza, Oracle Senior Vice President Systems Technology. “It also demonstrates that Oracle Database takes full advantage of advances made in servers like IBM’s p 570 to continue providing customers with unprecedented performance and scalability.”

I wonder what 11g will do?

LewisC

oracle benchmark performance

Earlier today, I attended a webinar by Hotsos. The webinar, titled Cost Based Optimizer: 1 of 2, was a basic introduction to the Cost Based Optimizer (CBO) in Oracle and the 10053 trace file. The CBO optimizes SQL queries and that optimization can be seen in a 10053 trace. It was not, what I would call, an advanced webinar but was done with plenty of examples and was very accessible for new comers to performance tuning.