Oracle Database

Sun SPARC T3 Servers

Oracle announced their new line of Sun SPARC T3 powered servers at Oracle Openworld 2010. The SPARC T3 processor includes several improvements on T2 and T2+ processors including:

T2 / T2+T3
65 nm manufacturing process40 nm manufacturing process
4MB L2 Cache6MB L2 Cache
8 Cores (8 threads/core)16 Cores (8 threads/core)
8 Crypto Accelerators (1/core)16 Crypto Accelerators (1/core)
DDR2 FB-DIMMsDDR3
1 On Board PCIe x8 v1 Port2 On Board PCIe x8 v2 Ports

It is interesting to note that the T2 processor was only used in single socket systems. The T2+ processor removed the T2's on board 10 GbE ports and other components to make room for the SMP glue. With the T3 processors, the 10 GbE ports have returned and the chip has built in glueless support for 4 way servers.

All in all they have packed more T-Series goodness in a smaller package but I'm not making goo-goo eyes yet.

Vendor Lock-In or One Stop Shop

I was recently discussing load balancers with someone. I said I was much happier with F5 than I was with Cisco and he countered that although he preferred F5 head to head, going with Cisco for all the network was better for them in the long run.

The situation with storage is similar. EMC makes a great SAN but a pretty bad NAS. Is it worth getting EMC's NAS for the One Stop Shop factor?

Sun Oracle Webcast Wrap Up

Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle's strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I'm very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.

Real Time Reporting Databases

Reporting projects are the kind of projects which never seem to end. After a couple iterations I've come to the following conclusions:

  1. Absolutely no reports should run on a production database.
  2. Moving/aggregating data from a production database to a reporting database using ETL tools prone to synchronization issues and pretty unreliable.
  3. The best option is to set up real time replication of the data and build additional views on that.

Unfortunately, if you need to get data from heterogeneous databases, ie. Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc. into a single reporting database, replication is not a simple solution. If you are running expensive database software in production, it may not be cost effective to run the same database for reporting.

Of course there are cross database replication solutions like Golden Gate or SharePlex but they are very expensive. I had already given up on getting data from Oracle into MySQL for reports when I stumbled across Tungsten Replicator.