Ranko Mosic

(Please refer to the following article: Oracle 12c In-Memory Database is Out - Hardly Anybody Notices for update on Oracle 12c databases) Contemporary large servers are routinely configured with 2TB of RAM. It is thus possible to fit an entire average size OLTP database in memory directly accessible by CPU. There is a long history of academic research on how to best utilize relatively abundant computer memory. This research is becoming increasingly relevant as databases serving business applications are heading towards memory centric design and implementation. If you simply place Oracle RDBMS's files on Solid State Disk, or configure buffer cache (SGA) large enough to contain the whole database, Oracle will not magically become an IMDB database, nor it will perform much faster.  In order to properly utilize memory, IMDB databases require purposely architected, confi... (more)

Enterprise Class Oracle Databases in the Public Cloud?

Most of enterprise class shops today run their Oracle databases on either HP-UX, AIX or Sun OS operating systems. Is it possible to move these databases to the public cloud, and, if so, who are providers who can help with such a move? Public cloud services are closely related to virtualization i.e. usage of various flavors of popular Virtual Machines (VMware, XEN). VMs are one of major ingredients giving cloud services such great characteristics as scalability, on-demand instant provisioning and deprovisioning of resources. Virtual Machines are able to run many guest operating s... (more)

Oracle RDBMS and Very Large Data Set Processing

Oracle database is a relational database management system that mostly complies with ACID transaction requirements ( atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability ). It means that each database transaction will be executed in a reliable, safe and integral manner. In order to comply with ACID Oracle database software implements fairly complex and expensive (in terms of computing resources, i.e., CPU, disk, memory) set of processes like redo and undo logging, memory latching, meta data maintenance etc. that make concurrent work possible, while maintaining data integrity. Any databa... (more)

Building Enterprise Class Oracle Databases on Amazon Web Services

AWS is built on commodity hardware and it is software virtual machine based. AWS documentation states that: It's inevitable that EC2 instances will fail, and you need to plan for it. As a rule of thumb, you should be a pessimist when designing architecture for the cloud. That means that putting your Oracle databases on AWS cloud should be accompanied with carefully thought out fault tolerance and DR procedures. It is likely that: An AWS instance running Oracle database will fail Some of volumes ( EBS storage ) attached to an instance running Oracle database will fail, i.e., you wi... (more)

Hadoop Distributed Storage Management on Amazon Web Services

Hadoop and AWS are enterprise ready cloud computing, distributed technologies. It is straightforward to add more DataNodes i.e. storage to Hadoop cluster on AWS. You just need to create another AWS instance and add a new node to Hadoop cluster. Hadoop will take care of balancing storage to keep level of file system utilization across DataNodes as  even  as possible. Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop includes Cloudera Manager which makes it simple to install Hadoop and add new nodes to it. Screenshot below shows an existing HDFS service with two DataNodes. We will expand HDFS by a... (more)