Data Warehouses: How Does Yours Compare? Here’s how to find out!
February 22nd, 2006 by Mark Rittman
Keith Laker from the Oracle
Business Intelligence product team dropped me a line this evening, to tell me
about a survey the Data Warehouse Development team at Oracle are carrying out.
It sounds like a useful and interesting survey and I’ll certainly be taking
part. Here’s Keith’s message:
"At the start of most data warehouse projects, or even during a project, I
am sure you as customers try to find answers to the following questions to help
you plan and manage your environments:
- Where can I find trend and comparison information to help me plan for
future growth of my data warehouse? - How many cpu’s do other customers use per terabyte?
- How many partitions are typically used in large tables? How many
indexes? - How much should I allocate for memory for buffer cache?
- How does my warehouse compare to others of similar and larger scale?
The data warehouse development team, here at Oracle would like to help
provide answers to these questions. However, to do this we need your help. If
you have an existing data warehouse environment, we would like to obtain more
technical information about your environment(s) by running a simple measurement
script and returning the output files to us, here at Oracle. This will allow our
developers to provide comprehensive documents that explain best practices and
get a better understanding of which features our customers use the most. This
will also allow you as Customers, to benchmark your environments compared to
other customers’ environments.
From a Company perspective we are also interested to get feedback on features we
have added to the database, are these features used, how are they used etc. For
example we are keen to understand:
- Which initialization parameters are most frequently used at what
values? - How many Oracle data warehouses run on RAC? on single nodes?
- Is there a trend one-way or the other, especially as data volumes
increase? - Does this change with newer releases of the database?
All results from these scripts will be held confidential. No customers will
be mentioned by name; only summaries and trends will be reported (e.g., “X
percent of tables are partitioned and Y percent are indexed in data warehouses
that are Z terabytes and larger in size.” or “X percent of Oracle9i and Y
percent of Oracle10g data warehouses surveyed run RAC”). Results will be written
up as a summarized report. Every participating customer will receive a copy of
the report.
Terabyte and larger DW are the primary interest, but information on any data
warehouse environment is useful. We would like to have as many customers as
possible submit results, ideally by the end of this week. However, this will be
an on going process so regular feedback after this week is extremely useful.
To help our developers and product management team please download and run the
DW measurement script kit from OTN which is available from the following link:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/10g/dw_survey_0206.html
Please return the script outputs using the link shown on the above web page,
see the FAQ section, or alternatively mail them directly to me:
keith.laker@oracle.com.
Thank you and we look forward to your responses."
February 23rd, 2006 at 10:03 am
Interestingly, they only appear to be interested in *nix installations since it’s setup to run perl scripts and stuff - yes, I know you can run that on Windoze too but not without doing some additional work.
Maybe an oversight from Keith ?
I’m testing the scripts out on a home SUSE 10 db and if it all works fine then I’ll propose running it at my client…their choice ultimately.
February 23rd, 2006 at 11:28 am
Shame the survey requires running the RDA. My current project’s security policy forbids things like that, so I guess we won’t be participating. Still the final report should make interesting reading.
Cheers, APC