Why databases aren’t really fast

When most Oracle databases are inspected to see exactly what they are doing, most often it is disk I/O access. Databases read and write a lot of data, and because magnetic drive technology is slow, often the database spends a majority of its time waiting for disk read/write requests to complete.

How [...]

Many of us are familiar with the idea of using the Oracle 10g cross-platform transportable tablespaces (XTTS) feature to migrate a database to another operating system.  Our founder Roger Schrag wrote a fantastic whitepaper on the subject which can still be found at:
 
http://www.dbspecialists.com/files/presentations/changing_platforms.html
 
along with many other useful whitepapers about performance tuning, software installation, remote database [...]

Sooner or later, every DBA will need to address how to manage storage capacity in their databases. Nearly every database needs more storage as time goes on, and without attention, the database will fill up, and new data/inserts can’t happen. It’s been my experience that bad space mangement is the root cause of a high [...]

When you happen across a table with lots of indexes, what’s the first thought that crosses your mind? 
 
Okay, having gotten that bit of venting out of the way, what’s the second thought?  Are all of these indexes actually used?  That’s a legitimate question and one that comes up from time to time in our remote [...]

As Oracle consultants we often get caught up in the esoteric areas of performance, such as contention, complex execution plans, and obscure parameters.  But we forget that sometimes it’s the little things that count, many of which we learned in the DBA101 phase of our careers.
I was reminded of this recently at one of our [...]

There was education—everything from RAC and Exadata to SQL Developer and Java Server Faces.
There was food—everything from Prosciutto and Salmon to Biscotti and Chocolate-Dipped Strawberries.
There were prizes and giveaways—books from Oracle Press, duffel bags, Iron Man 2 posters, DVDs of the Oracle Database Appliance, and more.
There was networking—an opportunity to meet and greet Oracle luminaries [...]

On 12th May Oracle updated the 11.1.0.7 April CPU 2010 security patch (9369783) on all platforms.  The original April 13th patch causes 239 invalid objects in the database if the OLAP option is NOT installed.  So, if you were planning to apply this patch you should download the 12th May version.  You can find out the details in metalink [...]

Dear NoCOUG members and friends,
Happy New Year; may it be productive for all of us! The next NoCOUG conference will be held on Thursday, February 11 from 9 A.M. to 5 A.M. at the CarrAmerica conference center in Pleasanton. Top billing this time goes to Dr. Neil Gunther, the world’s foremost expert in database performance [...]

I was asked to tune a “Top N” query; a simplified version is shown below. Table t1 is first filtered by group (WHERE group_id = :group_id) then partitioned by subgroup (PARTITION BY subgroup_id) and sorted by timestamp (ORDER BY timestamp DESC). The record with the most recent timestamp in each partition is the one required [...]

Got some pennies, brother? For just 33 cents—plus a little more for shipping and handling—you can have a used copy of the best book on Oracle internals that was ever written: Oracle8i Internal Services for Waits, Latches, Locks, and Memory by Steve Adams. Yes it doesn’t have the word RAC in it, but what is [...]