AND SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FLASH CACHING APPLIANCES AND SSD SANS
By Eyal Markovich
George Crump, of Storage Switzerland, published an interesting post recently titled Cost Effectively Solving Oracle Performance Problems. Crump explains the challenges of solving Oracle storage performance problems (including several Oracle instances) while keeping Oracle data in shared storage.
In his analysis, Crump details three solid-state storage solutions that address Oracle performance:
Augmentation to existing mechanical storage via tiering or caching;
Using SSD on Oracle’s application server itself to cache data;
Using forklift upgrade solutions or database machines such as Oracle Exadata.
In his January 18 Information Week storage blog, Biggest Storage Trend of 2012, George Crump predicts that storage performance management will likely be the biggest concern of IT in 2012. Performance management includes directing applications to the right storage infrastructure, monitoring storage performance in real time, and making quick adjustments when necessary to ensure your mission critical business processes run smoothly and quickly.
The increasing importance of performance management comes not only from the proliferation of speed- and latency-sensitive business processes and database applications, but from the fast rise of SSD that can actually provide that performance at a reasonable price. Crump points to the need for tools that provide quick, valuable, real-time insight to ensure that performance requirements are met consistently with the best bang for the buck.
The recognition of that need is behind the streamlined and information-rich architecture and interface of Kaminario’s management and performance analysis software for the K2 product line.
In a previous posts, “db file sequential read,” “db file scattered read” wait events, and “Direct path Read,” I explained three common wait events that are associated with I/O Wait. In this post, I will describe two other common wait events that in many cases are caused by weak storage performance.
In previous posts, “db file sequential read” and “db file scattered read” wait events, I explained two common wait events that are associated with I/O Wait. In this post I will describe another common wait event that in many cases is caused by a weak storage performance.
Direct path read is an access path in which multiple Oracle blocks are read directly to the Oracle process memory without being read into the buffer cache in the Shared Global Area (SGA). This event is usually caused by scanning an entire table, index, table partition, or index partition during Parallel Query execution (although 11g support “direct path read” on serial scans). The following SQL statement illustrates a parallel query scanning a table:
THE KAMINARIO/FUSION-IO PARTNERSHIP GIVES YOU THE BEST OF PERFORMANCE AND AVAILABILITY
By Eyal Markovich
PCI Express SSD cards are the rage in IT departments looking for super fast, low latency application reads and writes. Why? PCIe Flash products take advantage of direct memory access over the PCIe bus, which is typically much faster than an external fibre channel or iSCSI connection. If you’re looking for maximum read and write performance in a single server, these solid state drive (SSD) solutions can fit the bill nicely. Read the rest of this entry »
In a previous post, “db file sequential read” wait event, I have explained the db file sequential read wait which is the most common wait event in Oracle that is associated with I/O Wait). In this post I will describe the second most common event that I see when system suffer from I/O waits: db file scattered read. Read the rest of this entry »
In a previous post, I have discussed steps and methods to calculate I/O wait from an Oracle AWR report. The key and sometimes challenge task is to identify wait events which are related to the storage. While many waits may be caused by I/O related performance issues, the following waits are the main ones on which Oracle foreground session will be waiting:
db file sequential read
db file scattered read
direct path read
direct path read temp
direct path write temp
free buffer wait
log file sync
read by other session
In the next few posts, I will explain these waits. This important information is taken from the Oracle performance white paper written by Bartal Vindzberg (availability of this white paper will be posted in a future blog article). Read the rest of this entry »
In the following video, Eyal Markovich, Performance Director for Kaminario, talks about how to identify if your database application has a storage I/O bottleneck. He discusses I/O wait time as the root cause of poor database performance and how to assess if you have an I/O wait time problem.
George Crump, of Storage Switzerland, published an interesting post recently titled Cost Effectively Solving Oracle Performance Problems. Crump explains the challenges of solving Oracle storage performance problems (including several Oracle instances) while keeping Oracle data in shared storage.
PCI Express SSD cards are the rage in IT departments looking for super fast, low latency application reads and writes. Why? PCIe Flash products take advantage of direct memory access over the PCIe bus, which is typically much faster than an external fibre channel or iSCSI connection. If you’re looking for maximum read and write performance in a single server, these solid state drive (SSD) solutions can fit the bill nicely. 
