[June 23, 2010 Update:  Our Server Technologies team has just released Note 1061366.1 that lists recommended Advanced Compression patches applicable to all customers, including E-Business Suite environments]

In my opinion, if there’s any reason to upgrade an E-Business Suite environment to the 11gR1 or 11gR2 database, it’s the Advanced Compression database option.  Oracle Advanced Compression was introduced in Oracle Database 11g, and allows you to compress structured data (numbers, characters) as well as unstructured data (documents, spreadsheets, XML and other files).  It provides enhanced compression for database backups and also includes network compression for faster synchronization with standby databases.  

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In other words, the promise of Advanced Compression is that it can make your E-Business Suite database smaller and faster.  But how well does it actually deliver on that promise?

Apps 12 + Advanced Compression Benchmarks now available

Three of my colleagues, Uday Moogala, Lester Gutierrez, and Andy Tremayne, have been benchmarking Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Advanced Compression 11gR1.  They’ve just released a detailed whitepaper with their benchmarking results and recommendations. This whitepaper is available in two locations:

Vision Database:  Up to 68% compression and up to 36% improved performance

The results, even with our EBS Vision demonstration database, were impressive:

  • Reduced 21.9 GB of tables down to 6.9 GB (68% reduction, average 3:1 compression ratio)
  • Self-service performance improved up to 36%
  • Purchasing performance improved up to 10%
  • Order-to-Cash batch flow performance improved up to 33%
  • Payroll performance improved up to 25%
They also found some other interesting effects:
  • Some SQL execution plans changed, reducing performance
  • Performance was improved at the cost of up to 6% increased CPU usage, with the variance depending upon how much DML is performed
  • In the case of the Order-to-Cash batch flow, the average CPU consumption actually decreased by 7%
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Oracle using this in production with EBS 12 today

We can now share the news that we’ve been using Advanced Compression in our Oracle Global Single Instance (GSI) production environment since 2009.  This same team has been working to analyse the results of using Advanced Compression with our Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 global single instance that we use to run Oracle’s own business.  The results there are very impressive:

  • Reduced EBS 12 database size from 17 Terabytes to 13 Terabytes
  • Compressed ~260 tables and over 700 associated indices and LOBs after migrating to SecureFiles
  • Total space saved: 68 TB across our primary, standby, and associated testbeds

Other E-Business Suite-specific observations about Advanced Compression

This whitepaper makes detailed E-Business Suite-specific observations in the following areas:

  1. Index compression
  2. Recommended patches
  3. SQL Plan regression analysis
  4. DML intensive operations
  5. Row chaining on UPDATE transactions
  6. ITL contention
  7. High transaction tables
  8. SecureFiles LOB compression

The whitepaper concludes with specific recommendations on planning your Advanced Compression conversion in your E-Business Suite environment, and then lists all of the tables compressed in the Vision testbed as well as Oracle’s own EBS 12 production instance.

Have you used Advanced Compression with EBS?

Naturally, compression ratios and performance impacts or benefits will vary for every Apps environment.  If you’ve used this technology, we’re very interested in hearing about your experiences with Advanced Compression in your environment.  You’re invited to share your experiences here or drop me an email directly.

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