Interested in a free DB health/performance assessment? Just send us your AWR/Statspack report. We’ll provide you with a free assessment and information on how our Memory Arrays can improve your DB performance.

Violin flash Memory Arrays provide a simple, reliable solution for scalable high performance storage. Data intensive applications like Databases, Business Intelligence/Analytics, and Data Warehousing often suffer from storage I/O bottlenecks that cripple performance. Flash Memory Arrays ensure the lowest latency data access, provide high bandwidth connections, and scale to hundreds of TBs so even the largest databases can be stored in memory. Benefits include:

• Faster transaction and query performance
• Higher CPU utilization
• Reduced power, cooling and space costs by 50-80%
• Fewer DB licenses required

Top Five Places to use Flash Memory Arrays with Oracle

1. Temp Space: Each database provides a Program/Process Global Area (PGA) for applications/users to work with application data and perform sorts and joins. This space is often too small to effectively handle the application or user workload. If this occurs then all sorts, joins etc. must take place in Temp Table Space, an area of storage for the database that is set aside for this type function. Low-Latency response time is critical.
2. Redo/Archive Log: The critical link to database recovery, without these files and their counterpart Archive Log, database recovery would be really simplified. URLT (Update Resume and Leave Town). Since Redo and Archive have complete autonomy over the ability to access and work with an Oracle Instance, these files are always placed on the fastest storage available. At 150 microseconds, it is hard to be faster than flash.
3. Undo: What ever happened to Rollback Segments? Undo Table Spaces provide for the capability to rollback any changes during a query, update etc. Speed during these operations drives a more efficient use of database resources.
4. Flashback: Whether you are managing development or production the ability to flashback to a point in time is very valuable. Use Flashback Database during major upgrades such as migrations from Oracle 11.5.9 to 11.5.10.2 of EBS. If a major event occurs and you need to revert, Flashback can provide this capability. With flash storage, it becomes extremely fast.
5. Backup/Recovery/Replication: Data Guard, Streams, GoldenGate and RMAN ‚ all of these tools benefit from a fast low-latency storage solution. Look at Data Guard, with the various protection modes available how often do you choose maximum protection mode? Since there is a heavy penalty for writing committed data, this option is not usually chosen for solutions that do not absolutely require it. With flash at 150 microsecond latency, this capability becomes more reasonable. Maybe an investment GoldenGate or SharePlex is no longer required.

We have also collected a number of best practices and tips for running Oracle environments with Violin. That link has information and code samples for Automatic Storage Management (ASM), compression, replication, Data Guard, and RAC.

Is RAC Right for you?

RAC can help with scaling certain workloads to benefit from additional CPU and the use of “application partitioning”. You can even segment workloads to specific nodes within the cluster. Throw in some additional cluster knowledge and RAC can even survive a node failure and resume work on remaining nodes in the cluster.

The challenge is building a solution that is able to handle the ‚ “IO Storm” that is generated when a server fails and the remaining nodes have to absorb the work. This is one aspect that makes configuring RAC a complex task: planning for failure to ensure you have enough bandwidth to absorb the work that is being requested.

Compared to the technologies that existed before RAC, Real Application Clusters is a terrific product and there are areas where it makes sense to leverage its capabilities. In fact, Oracle has a very good whitepaper on Maximum Availability Architecture where RAC and Data Guard are used together to provide a highly available environment.

If you only need a reliable, fast HA solution that does not require additional software licenses (RAC) or hardware (Shared Storage & Switches) to support your goal you should look into Oracle Data Guard. For those utilizing Standard Edition, revisit Standby Database. These tools are bundled with the database and are very easy to setup and configure. Add on fast failover to improve the performance of fail-over and recovery.