Some readers complain that we don't have sufficient documentation to cover all possible scenarios and topics of interest. This is a valid observation. As your E-Business Suite deployments grow in complexity and scope, keeping ahead of your questions and new requirements is a constant challenge.
In my position as the editor of this blog, something I do only in my so-called free time, my situation is the odd inverse of yours, namely: the rate at which we release new Metalink Notes far-outstrips my capacity to read and announce them to the world. Here's a much-belated announcement about a database partitioning whitepaper produced by our Applications Performance Group.
What Is Database Partitioning?
Partitioning allows a single database table and its associated indexes to be broken into smaller components depending on the table and choice of index partitioning methods. Several E-Business Suite modules take advantage of database partitioning right out of the box, and custom partitioning is also fully supported. I've covered database partitioning concepts for Apps environments in more depth in this older article.
Best Practices for Partitioning Apps Databases
As I've noted before, we have a group in our Applications Development division that's dedicated to optimizing the E-Business Suite's performance. As a member of this Applications Performance group, Mohsin Sameen has worked extensively with some of our enterprise-class customers -- including many of the largest companies in the world -- on fine-tuning the performance of of their high-volume Apps environments.
Mohsin has distilled these experiences into an extensive and in-depth paper on database partitioning:
- Database Partitioning for Oracle E-Business Suite (Metalink Note 554539.1)
- Overview of database partitioning concepts
- Table partitioning strategies involving range, list, hash, composite, and multi-column partitions
- Index partitioning methods, including global and local partitioned indexes
- Step-by-step decision framework for using partitions
- Partition maintenance operations
- Partitioning case study
Related Articles
- Using Database Partitioning with the E-Business Suite
- Performance Tuning for the E-Business Suite
- Performance Tuning the Apps Database Layer
- Master Class in Apps 11i Performance Tuning
- Partitioning and Purging Best Practices for Oracle E-Business Suite
Comments (5)
Steven,
Partitioning is a great performance option but creates some unique testing challenges every time you patch as you have to validate that everything is working as designed. That's hard enough in a system without partitioning.
Our biggest challenge is getting DBAs to walk (apply the latest technology and CPU patches) - most of them want to start off with multi-tier RAC without tech/FP patches and then say the Apps are not "working" correctly. :-(
Just a rant. I'll stop now. :-)
Good stuff and glad to finally see some E-Business supported methods from Oracle.
thx,
John
Posted by John Stouffer | May 29, 2008 6:25 AM
Posted on May 29, 2008 06:25
Hi, Michael,Interesting suggestion. I've passed this along to the Applications Performance group for their comments. I'll post an update here on their response.Regards,Steven
Posted by Steven Chan | June 11, 2008 10:35 AM
Posted on June 11, 2008 10:35
Hi Steven,
It would be great if the EBS Performance Team considered integrating database partitioning on FND_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS. Having a limitation of 50k rows is so 1980s, and many large corporations push more than 50k requests every day. This does not afford much time to resolve issues (requests ending with a status of 'ERROR'.
Thanks -Michael
Posted by Michael Taylor | June 11, 2008 12:33 PM
Posted on June 11, 2008 12:33
Agreed on the FND_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS! This is a big headache for us as we push a lot of batch jobs through a day and it gets really slow, really quick.
Also from what I understand Oracle charges a lot for database partitioning in the enterprise edition, correct? This is CPU based and if you have a large DB footprint (which we do) it can get expensive very quickly.
Thanks - Drew
Posted by Drew Poggemann | September 5, 2008 8:16 AM
Posted on September 5, 2008 08:16
Hi, Drew,
I believe that our Apps Performance team is working on the FND_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS issue now. I don't have any more details that I can share, but I'll post any news as soon as it becomes available.
>Also from what I understand Oracle charges a lot
>for database partitioning in the enterprise edition,
>correct?
I'm in EBS Development, and I'm afraid that I don't have a lot of visibility into Database licencing costs or policies. This is something you might want to ask your Oracle account manager. He or she can provide you with specifics around the latest licencing terms.
Regards,
Steven
Posted by Steven Chan | September 5, 2008 1:38 PM
Posted on September 5, 2008 13:38