As mentioned before, I frequently find myself in discussions around Oracle performance and how an Oracle database behaves on EMC storage. It turns out that often there is a lot of confusion on how the different layers interact with each…
Application processing at lightning performance – The hourglass view of access times
Even in these modern times, when lots of things are changing in the ICT world, some lessons from the past still hold true. Previously, I discussed the I/O stack in a typical database environment. As virtualization has complicated things a…
Performance – The I/O stack
In my last post, I gave a highly simplified representation of “The I/O stack” of a database. In reality, it’s much more complex. I found an old picture where the whole I/O stack of a database was described and I…
The missing link in application performance tuning
When dealing with application performance problems, the quick and easy solution is often to throw hardware at the problem. Typically this is one out of processing power (CPU), memory, or more I/O resources. With a bit of luck, the bottleneck…
POC: Piece Of Cake or Point Of Contradiction?
Every now and then I get involved in Customer Proof of Concepts. A Proof of Concept (POC) is, according to Wikipedia, something like a demonstration of feasibility of a certain idea, concept or theory.