Ask IT professionals handling a company’s data center, and they will tell you that they are looking to cut down on costs while also talking about operational streamlining. The thought behind this is that they would like to differentiate IT and help stakeholders and users get the most out of the system. But very few are talking about extreme performance.
Imagine what IT could do for the organization if it were able to:
- Overcome the limits on technology, so that an analyst could easily perform deeper analysis of the business’ historical data. That would mean being able to process terabytes and petabyte of data in your data warehouse at a faster rate than is possible now. Your business managers and other end users would be able to get access to insights into trends and patterns that could allow them to make faster and better decisions that could in turn give you the advantage of being the first in the marketplace.
- Provide powerful online transaction processing systems. Imagine being able to do workload calculations without suffering from lags. You can easily offer your customers the best deals, 24/7, as soon as it become available and appropriate. This would give your company the edge, especially if you belong to an industry that is fast moving and highly competitive such as online travel and other similar markets.
- Consolidate both OLTP and data warehouse systems on one platform to get a real time data warehouse. With this, you can get the fastest speeds when loading and analyzing data, ensuring that your reports and analytics makes use of the latest data available, all the time.
The hurdles
It is no secret, however, that these are very difficult to accomplish. As data volume grows, performance usually suffers. With big data coming into the picture, businesses are now getting and holding on to more data than ever. Performance usually suffers as more data is in place for more users.
Also, IT is struggling to ensure that all reports and analytics are based on the latest data available, and that they have consistent and complete information in place.
Further, companies usually find that they do not have a lot of options as far as database appliance is concerned. This applies to environments when they have to switch seamlessly from data warehousing to OLTP.
Because of these roadblocks, realizing the benefits we have outlined above may just be a pipe dream. That is unless you get Oracle Exadata.
How Oracle Exadata enables great performance
Oracle Exadata gives you an engineered database machine that is already set up and configured. It gives you:
- A storage layer that carries out data intensive queries. Instead of moving large volumes of data from storage, you only access the data from this layer, giving you the chance to improve speed even with the most complex queries.
- Hybrid columnar compression gives you the ability to compress data by at least 10x. This way you do not have to spend too much on storage and even move your old data on tape. What this means is that you have easy and fast access to your data rather than rendering historical data directly inaccessible to users.
- Smart flash cache deals with hot data. Plus it allows you to have very low latency when accessing the latest information.
- Mutiversion read consistency ensures that the end users would get a uniform view of the data requested, even when the underlying data changes.
You also get a 40-gigabytes-per-second Infiniband network, ensuring that you have connectivity that is much faster than traditional server or storage networks.
Contact Four Cornerstone if you need Oracle consulting in Dallas or want to learn more about Oracle Exadata.
Photo by Stefano Petroni.
