Conversations about enterprise data management used to focus mostly on terabytes, but that conversation is changing.
Topics: storage, Storage for DBAs, storage architecture, Storage Array
Database Health Check: Operate at Fullest Potential
Whether your company runs on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2, MySQL, IBM Informix, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB, your database is a complex machine that relies on maintenance to function well. A database health check is essential to identify problematic sections so you can enhance your database in the areas that aren’t operating at their fullest potential.
Topics: Databases, Storage for DBAs, SQL Server, Extreme Performance, Transformation
Today we announced a really cool new product called the XVS 8. In a nutshell, we made the fastest enterprise storage in the world – faster. Speed, and by speed, I mean ultra-low latency, can do some amazing things. It does the obvious, it lets your applications run faster, increasing profitability and customer satisfaction. Lowering latency does another cool thing, it lets you consolidate your infrastructure.
Topics: Oracle, SQL, Storage for DBAs, Storage Array, Virtualization, Violin Systems, Extreme Performance, Critical Applications
Storage for DBAs:
Ever been to one of those sushi restaurants where the food comes round in dishes on a conveyor belt?
Topics: IO Randomization, MySQL, IO scheduling, Storage for DBAs, SQL Server, Extreme Performance
Storage for DBAs: As a rule of thumb, pretty much any storage system can be characterised by three fundamental properties:
Latency is a measurement of delay in a system; so in the case of storage it is the time taken to respond to an I/O request. It's a term which is frequently misused - more on this later - but when found in the context of a storage system's data sheet it often means the average latency of a single I/O. Latency figures for disk are usually measured in milliseconds; for flash a more common unit of measurement would be microseconds.
Topics: database, flash memory, Storage for DBAs
Storage for DBAs: Everyone wants their stuff to go faster. Whether it’s your laptop, tablet, phone, database or application… performance is one of the most desirable characteristics of any system. If your system isn't fast enough, you start dreaming of more. Maybe you try and tune what you already have, or maybe you upgrade to something better: you buy a phone with a faster processor, put a flash-based SSD in your laptop or upgrade to a newer model.
When it comes to databases, I often meet people considering the same set of options for boosting performance (usually in this order): half-heartedly tuning the database, adding more DRAM, properly tuning the database, adding or upgrading CPUs, then finally tuning the application. It amazes me how much time, money and effort is often spent trying to avoid getting the application developers to write their code properly, but that’s a subject for another article.
The point of this article is the following statement: to achieve the best performance on any system it is important that all of its resources are balanced.
Let’s think about the basic resources that comprise a computer system such as a database server:
Topics: database, flash memory, Storage for DBAs