Rob Smyth's Blog

Have you ever heard an Oracle person talking about OFA.  I bet you have!  In my 11 years at Oracle it has stood for:

Oracle Financial Analyzer
Optimal Flexible Architecture
Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle Fusion Architecture

A friend's personal favourite is the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals which actually comes top of the list at www.acronyma.com

From the general to the particular

As you might imagine, working in a technical sales role I often get asked about the Grid.  There are lots of definitions of the grid and you can find out more about Oracle's at the following launchpad:

http://www.oracle.com/technologies/grid/index.html

The key piece of information that I think is not well understood is not the Real Application Cluster debate anymore, it seems to be a question of how do we share work around the nodes in a grid.  This paper explains how services operate and then goes on to explain how the database tier and the application server tier can interoperate:

Paper on Services

As many of you may know, Oracle technology can be licensed on a processor basis.

But what is a processor?  As a technologist, speaking to other technologists there is generally a tacit understanding of what this is.  However recent changes in technology have led to Oracle creating examples and illustrating licensing rules.

This is not just an Oracle problem.  There is an interesting article here: http://sageza.com/available/Snapshot/StratSN%205-16-06%20Processors.pdf which illustrates the wider problem in the community.  I would be interested to hear any views on this subject and whether perhaps a standard definition needs to be agreed between vendors.

Of course, as shown in the licensing rules above there is always the alternative of using Named User Plus as the metric.

In my earlier post, chips with everything, I discussed the issue of what is a processor.  This leads inexorably to the topic of how to get the best performance out of the servers that you have bought.  While practice makes perfect it is also worth considering some models to help you work out the feasibility of what you are proposing.  Oracle 10g has a performance tuning guide in the documentation set and includes sections on:
Designing and developing for performance
Performance Improvement Methods
and
I/O Configuration and Design

There are also other helpful sites out there in the Oracle community.  Of particular interest to me due to my mathematics background is the queueing theory model expounded here: http://resources.orapub.com/forecast_main.asp
and there are many others.  My recommendation is that if you know you need to have a performant system, use these ideas to help you, your DBAs and your developers have performance in their minds whenever they are building or writing functionality.

Sometimes it makes sense to add storage as your data grows.  However, it can be quite advantageous to consider the end-of-life of your data as well.  This will limit your storage requirements and, planned in advance, will allow you to audit, keep records that have to be retained and purge non-functional data.  This will give the added benefit of improving performance.  For bespoke systems, this should form part of the design prinicples of the application, and we have recently introduced the ILM Assistant to help you take this approach together with a partitioning strategy.

For Oracle E-Business Suite, with its rich functionality, you will not be surprised to find that as well as supporting partitioning of the data we have a number of purge routines built into the application.  There is a really good presentation on how partitioning and purging can help performance here:
Partitioning and Purging


One of the key system purges I would recommend is the purging of workflows and as this is probably a hot topic, here is a link to the

documentation outlining what we recommend for workflow:

Workflow documentation link


So it is a question of continually increasing storage and not worrying about archiving or planning for the end-of-life for significant data.  There are arguments on both sides but hopefully these links will give you an introduction to what's available within Oracle to help you decide if partitioning and purging would work for you.