Author: Marc Fielding

For those of you in the New York City area, I’ll be speaking at the NYOUG joint BI/DW and Web SIG meeting. The topic will be a case study of Pythian’s Exadata implementation at LinkShare.

The Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control monitoring plug-ins for Exadata have been released. This is great news for Exadata users, since important components like InfiniBand switches previously had no direct monitoring. The plug-in bundle includes five separate monitoring plugins, here they are.

I just got an Exadata Customer Advisory e-mail from Oracle, identifying “an important issue that needs your immediate attention” and pointing to MOS note 1265396.1. The only fix is to upgrade to the newly-released version 11.2.2.1.1 of the storage server software.

I was searching oracle.com for some Exadata-related wait events, and noticed some hits popping up from formerly closely-held Exadata documentation. Upon closer look, I found the full Exadata V1 user’s guide. I hope the V2 documentation will be posted soon.

For those of you who weren’t able to attend my webinar last week “Implementing Exadata: the results are in, recordings are now available here online.

One of the key features of Exadata V2 is the flash cache. Although commonly thought of as an OLTP-specific feature, it has also been marketed as a data warehouse accelerator. According to this frequently-used presentation slide, a full Exadata rack provides 21 GB/sec of disk throughput and 50GB/sec of flash throughput. was testing throughput using a simple query, making use of both smart scans and parallel execution. Here’s what the objects look like. They’re running on a quarter rack system with a stated capacity of 4.5GB/sec disk and 11GB/sec flash.

Following up on my earlier webinar Implementing Oracle Exadata – Strategies for Success, I’ll be giving another webinar to present the results of the Exadata implementation at LinKShare. I’ll be talking about actual performance results, our zero-downtime go-live, compression experiences, and performance tuning in an Exadata environment.

It looks like our lucky recipients of plane rides with Sean D. Tucker had a great time. Pictures are below. Thanks again to Team Oracle for facilitating the flights.

Congratulations to Chris Marlowe of Oppenheimer Funds and Bill Mitchell of Alliant Energy, attendees to my Exadata session yesterday. Both are lucky winners of the a flight with the inimitable Sean D Tucker and the Oracle Challenger. For those of you who missed the session, keep your eyes on this blog for a recording, coming soon.

I was looking at the Exadata page on OTN and noticed something interesting: instead of the “Sun Oracle Database Machine”, it’s now headlined as the “Oracle Exadata Database Machine”.