The fastest I/O is the one you never do. By applying optimization, customers can dramatically cut the number of disk I/Os needed to run a database query. This is the story of one customer’s results from a 4-day EMC Oracle Assessment, and how they were able to avoid over 1 billion I/Os per day on a single database.
The Problem
The customer is a transportation company. They perform large nightly database updates. These updates have critical timelines for completion, so that the results are ready for use when other processes kick off in the morning. The updated data relates directly to the profitability of ongoing operations.
The application had been running OK, though it used a lot of hardware (Sun E10K servers and a pair of DMX-4 arrays, duplicated for DR and linked with SRDF). Since the application was purchased from an outside vendor, the tuning options were limited. The customer had worked with the vendor on several occasions to optimize the nightly batch processing. Benchmarks were conducted. Extensive examination was done of the data model. It appeared that the database and application were about as tuned as they could be, and more hardware was going to be the only path to keep up with growth.
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