In this age of big data, there are certain dangers. It is normal to expect the volume of data that you are keeping to double every two or three years. And managing all that data can present to be quite a challenge as IT would need to strive to give users and applications the best performance while also keeping costs down. The explosion of data is the reason why storage costs is still one of IT’s biggest expenditures even when the cost of storage decreases.
Oracle Database 12c has added two information lifecycle management functionalities:
- Heat Map
- Automatic Data Optimization
Heat Map allows you to automatically query timestamps and track changes at segment and row levels, so that you can see how your data is being accessed, including when these have been accessed and how often. You can use this heat map information so that Automatic Data Optimization can compress and move your data automatically, based on the policies that you define.
How does this help?
As you know, applications and users access their data differently. There are data that are accessed frequently or those that are tagged as critical. And there are data that are not accessed for long periods of time as well as data that are no longer accessed. Now, the problem is keeping all of these in single storage, as it would be very costly and inefficient. So what IT departments do is to implement storage tiering. Tiering is when the frequently accessed and critical data are placed in the fastest storage, which is very costly, while cold data are placed in slower and more affordable storage. Because cold data are rarely accessed, the effects of them being stored on slow storage is minimal. Cold data may also be compressed while in this type of storage.
Heat Map takes a look at segment-level and row-level data and tracks its usage and how these change over time. It then assigns a color to indicate which sets of data are hot (frequently accessed), warm and cold.
You can then use these information so that Automatic Data Optimization can implement storage tiering and compression tiering. Automatic Data Optimization works by allowing you to set policies that it can use to determine when to compress and move the data. You do not even have to do anything beyond setting the policies as Automatic Data Optimization does everything automatically.
For example, you get on Automatic Data Optimization to set policies on what is to be done to data that have not been accessed, have not been changed or were created at a certain date. Then you need to specify when the policy will be carried out.
On top of this, you can also create other conditions outside of the data you get from heat map by using PL/SQL.
So, basically, with Automatic Data Optimization, you can make sure that your database data is accessed quickly and is always available, while also keeping your storage costs down. All these without having to spend too much time with it.
Are you convinced that you could benefit tremendously from this and other features of Oracle Database 12c? Call Four Cornerstone today and find out how you could start using Oracle Database 12c for your enterprise!
Photo by Oracle.
