Thank you, Larry Ellison

My colleague Vince Westin published this great post on his blog:

During his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Larry Ellison launched the new Exadata X3.
The new version appears to have some nice new capabilities, including caching writes to EFD, which are likely to improve the usability of Exadata for OLTP workloads. And he was nice enough to include the EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K in detail on 30% of his slides as he announced the new Exadata. And for that, I give thanks. I am sure that Salesforce.com were similarly thankful when Larry focused so much of his time on their product in his keynote last year.

Read the rest of his post here.

The post provides a bunch of good reasons why EMC VMAX might be a better choice for customers that run high-performance mission-critical environments. A highly recommended read!

Performance – The database stack

As mentioned before, I frequently find myself in discussions around Oracle performance and how an Oracle database behaves on EMC storage. It turns out that often there is a lot of confusion on how the different layers interact with each other and very few people seem to understand the whole stack.

So I started a personal challenge to make a “one picture tells more than 1000 words” complete overview of the Oracle on EMC database stack.

I failed.

Turns out it’s nearly impossible to get everything in one picture without cutting corners.

So here is a simplified (and therefore incorrect) picture. It ignores certain complexities and is far from complete, and might even contain errors.