After receiving the excellent “Expert Oracle Exadata” book I decided to spend some time looking into Exadata performance after I having spent most of the time previously on infrastructure related questions such as “how can I prevent someone from overwriting my DR system with UAT data”, patching etc.
Now there is one thing to keep in mind with Exadata-you need lots of data before it breaks into a little sweat. Luckily for me, one of my colleagues has performed some testing on this environment. For reasons unknown the swingbench order entry benchmark (version 2.3) has been chosen. For those who don’t know the OE benchmark: it’s a heavy OLTP style workload simulating a web shop where users browse products, place orders etc. OE is optimised for single block I/O, and despite what you may have heard, Exadata doesn’t provide a noticable benefit for these queries.
Anyway, what I liked was the fact that the order_items table had about 350 million rows organised in about 8GB. From discussions with Frits Hoogland I know that a full scan of such a table takes between 40 and 60 seconds depending on system load.
