Re: who's got the biggest and the fastest?

Sounds like you've been getting the marketing pitch...be careful and don't get caught up in it. Stick to the technicals.

Just to clarify, Oracle isn't OLAP based, unless you are using the OLAP feature and functionality.

Just curious, what "very big" and "very fast" to you? These words are a bit subjective and mean different things to different people.

Oracle is a significant player in the DW/DSS space and has been for a number of years. Check out the Winter Corp VLDB reports. In 2005, Yahoo had a 100 TB db on Oracle. I'm sure its grown since then.

An Oracle system can be architected to do whatever you want. You just have to define what *it* is. Start with good db design and smartly apply features where it can help. Probably the most important thing in choosing hardware for an Oacle DW/DSS system is to have a balanced system. This means that the CPU and I/O bandwidth are in a optimal ratio to each other. Optimal meaning that for your workload, both resources are exhausted at approximately the same time.

Don't be fooled that brute force table scans are the way either. There are certainly times when they are required, but remember the phrase "work smarter, not harder"? It applies here too. The fastest I/O is the one that never happens. Partitioning is your friend.

Hope that helps...

On 11/5/07, Robyn <robyn.sands_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> morning everyone,
>
> Anyone out there familiar with setting up very big and very fast Oracle? If
> you could start from scratch, how would you architect your system? What are
> some of the options that should be considered?
>
> Can a well designed Oracle system beat the proprietary data warehouse type
> specialists who claim that Oracle is OLAP based and therefore unable to
> match their speed with big data?
>
> Thoughts, comments and war stories appreciated ...
>
> Robyn

-- 
Regards,

Greg Rahn
http://structureddata.org
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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l