Greg Rahn

After posting about how ridiculous some of the benchmarketing claims that database vendors are making, Dave Menninger, VP of Marketing & Product Management at Vertica posted a comment that one of their customers reported a 40,400x gain in one query (this of course is after I openly joked about the 16,200x Vertica claim). So [...]

A few weeks ago I read Curt Monash’s report on interpreting the results of data warehouse proofs-of-concept (POCs) and I have to say, I’m quite surprised that this topic hasn’t been covered more by analysts in the data warehousing space. I understand that analysts are not database performance engineers, but where do they think [...]

Glenn Fawcett has put together a nice slide deck entitled “Oracle Analysis 101” that discusses techniques to collect and analyze performance data related to Oracle databases. It’s a good read so check it out. Glenn is also a great resource for Oracle on Sun Niagara 2 Processors (CMT) so be sure to peek [...]

Before External Tables existed in the Oracle database, loading from flat files was done via SQL*Loader. One option that some used was to have a compressed text file and load it with SQL*Loader via a named pipe. This allowed one not to have to extract the file, which could be several times the [...]

Chuck Hollis, VP and Global Marketing CTO at EMC has written a couple blog posts offering his thoughts on Oracle Exadata. The first was “Oracle Does Hardware” which he wrote the day after the product launch. The second, unimpressively titled “I Annoy Kevin Closson at Oracle” was on Monday October 20th which was [...]

I’ve written before on choosing an optimal stats gathering strategy but I recently came across a scenario that I didn’t directly blog about and think it deserves attention. As I mentioned in that previous post, one should only deviate from the defaults when they have a reason to, and fully understand that reason and [...]

This week (on Tuesday I believe) the 11.1.0.7 patch set for Oracle Database Server was released for for the “big 3″ Unix platforms as I call them: Sun Solaris SPARC 64, HP-UX Itanium, and IBM AIX 64-bit. The patchset number is 6890831 and is available for download from Metalink.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 is now in the books and it surely was a busy and exciting one. The launch of Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine was the highlight for me and I hope for many of you as well. Real-World Performance Group Presentations This year the Real-World Performance Group did three [...]

If you haven’t been under a rock you know that Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine at Oracle OpenWorld 2008. There seems to be quite a bit of interest and excitement about the product and I for one will say that I am extremely excited about [...]

Last week I read Mark Rittman’s post and today I was reading this InfoWorld article and a few others that are speculating what will be the big news this year at Oracle OpenWorld. I guess the first teaser was given out by Larry Ellison on the F4Q08 earnings call on June 25: We have a major database [...]