Recent Posts by Maria Colgan

Today Larry Ellison announced the general availability of Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Cloud Service, the newest member of the Oracle Autonomous Database family, combining the flexibility of cloud with the power of machine learning to deliver data management as a service. Traditionally, creating a database management system required a team of experts to custom build and manually maintain a complex hardware and software stack. With each system being unique,...

Graphics processing units or GPUs are dedicated highly parallel hardware accelerators that were originally design to accelerate the creation of images. More recently, folks have been looking at GPUs to accelerate other workloads like Database analytics and transaction processing (OLTP). Although GPUs have little or no use for OLTP style workloads, they have been shown to accelerate analytics. So, what kind of benefits can you expect from running the Oracle Database on a GPU...

If you recall from part 1 of our blog series on RAC each RAC node has it’s own In-Memory column store (IM column store). When a table is populated into memory in a RAC environment it will be automatically distributed across all of the IM column stores in the cluster. That is to say, a piece of the table will appear in each RAC node, effectively making the IM column store a shared-nothing architecture. We have also discussed how you can use Database Services to control where an...

There is less than 6 weeks to go until Oracle Open World, the largest gathering of Oracle customers, partners, developers, and technology enthusiasts, which begins on September 18th in San Francisco. Of course the In-Memory development group will be there and you will have multiple opportunities to meet up with us, in one of our technical sessions, our hands-on-labs or at the Oracle demogrounds.This year the In-Memory team has 4 technical sessions and there are also a number...

A couple of weeks ago at the Spring Conference of the Bulgarian Oracle User Group, Joel Goodman gave a great session on Bloom Filters and how the can improve the performance of hash joins in the Oracle Database especially in the In-Memory column store. At the end of that session the chap sitting in front of me turned around to show me an execution plan they got while testing Oracle Database In-Memory and posed the following question, “Where did the other bloom filter go?” Belo...

I recently got a question from a customer who has just begun adopting Database In-Memory and thought it was worth answering as a blog post in case anyone else had encountered the same scenario and was wondering what was going on.  Here is the question I got: “I've observed a scenario where a table is fully populated in the In-Memory column store with 0 in the  BYTES_NOT_POPULATED column in v$im_segments, but after some time, the BYTES_NOT_POPULATED column shows a non-zero value....

Believe it or not, it's time to start thinking about Oracle OpenWorld 2016! The Oracle OpenWorld 2016 call for papers is now opens! Oracle customers and partners are encouraged to submit proposals to present at this year's Oracle OpenWorld conference, which will be held September 18 - 22, 2016 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Details and submission guidelines are available on the Oracle OpenWorld Call for Papers web site. The deadline for submissions is Friday,  May...

After I posted last weeks blog post on identifying analytic queries that benefit from Database In-Memory, I got the following question, Why didn't Database In-Memory improve the performance of my query?" I've simplified the query in question down to the following, SELECT Count(DISTINCT cust_id)FROM ssh.salesWHERE amount_sold > 1; So, why didn’t Database In-Memory improve the performance of this query? The answer is becomes a little clearer if you look at the SQL Monitor report for...

Although Database In-Memory can be used in both Enterprise OLTP systems and Data Warehouses, only analytic queries will benefit from accessing data from the In-Memory column store (IM column store). Remember the IM column store enables large volumes of data to be rapidly scanned and processed using a variety of optimizations. Simpler transaction based queries, such as a primary key look up do not benefit from the IM column store and are automatically directed to the buffer...