It’s almost a year since I blogged about qdda (the Quick & Dirty Dedupe Analyzer). qdda is a tool that lets you scan any Linux disk or file (or multiple disks) and predicts potential thin, dedupe and compression savings if…
1,003 total views
Six alternatives to replace licensed Oracle database options
More and more I hear companies looking into replacing expensive licensed database options with more cost-effective alternatives, for various reasons: simple cost reduction, or avoiding lock-in, or because of other strategic considerations. In order to kickstart the creative thinking, here…
1,455 total views
The IOPS race is over
Infrastructure has always been a tough place to compete in. Unlike applications, databases or middleware, infrastructure components are fairly easy to replace with another make and model, and thus the vendors try to show off their product as better than…
987 total views
Baking a cake: trading CPU for IO?
Sometimes I hear people claim that by using faster storage, you can save on database licenses. True or false? The idea is that many database servers are suffering from IO wait – which actually means that the processors are waiting…
1,082 total views
Silly Little Oracle Benchmark – RPM edition
A while ago Kevin Closson announced a new release of the well-known SLOB kit. SLOB is a simple but powerful toolkit that drives lots and lots of IO on a real Oracle database (so for performance testing of database platforms,…
860 total views