Performance Comparison: Snowflake vs Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
Which data warehouse cloud platform is faster: Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse or Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse? The short answer: it depends. For a more detailed answer, read this blog post. Skiing is not recommended at the moment. Because of the current pandemic situation, it’s better…
Behind the Scenes: Preparing a Live Demo
One of the extensions in Oracle 20c is the possiblity to use the In-Memory Database option for Partitioned External Tables and Hybrid Partitioned Tables. In my opinion, this opens up many possibilities to perform efficient ad-hoc queries on Data Lakes. That’s why I prepared a…
AWS RDS IO Performance – What you really get!
2 configuration parameters affect the IO performance of your AWS RDS instance. The throughput is limited by the instance class and the number of IOPS is limited by the storage configuration. With provisioned IOPS (SSD) (short io1) it’s explicit, as you specify the limit during…
Design Tips for Query Rewrite
Although Query Rewrite on Materialized Views is a powerful feature which is available in Oracle databases for a long time, it is rarely used. Many developers and database administrators don’t know about it or do not use it because they think it is too complex….
Data Vault Queries and Join Elimination
If you work with Data Vault for a data warehouse running in an Oracle database, I strongly recommend to use Oracle 12.2 or higher. Why that? Since Oracle 12c Release 2, join elimination works for more than one join column. This is essential for queries…
Partition Pruning and NLS Settings
NLS (National Language Support) parameters are very useful for multilingual applications in an Oracle database. But it is important to understand their impact on query performance. I was aware that NLS is important for indexes, but never thought about its impact on partitioning. In a…
How to Save 7 Keystrokes with dbms_xplan
An almost unknown simplification in the usage of dbms_xplan is possible since Oracle 12.2. Sometimes, there are small details that makes our job (a little bit) easier. In one of his presentations at the Kscope19 conference, Kim Berg Hansen mentioned an interesting detail about the syntax…
Bitmap-based COUNT(DISTINCT) Functions in Oracle 19c
Oracle 19c provides a set of new SQL functions for bitmap operations. They allow fast computation of COUNT(DISTINCT) expressions. What is the purpose of these functions? The Oracle documentation is very sparse, but at least it tells us that the main focus are Materialized Views on…
Materialized View Refresh for Dummies
Materialized Views are often used in data warehouses to improve query performance on aggregated data. But what if it takes too long to refresh the materialized views? Here are some basic rules to improve refresh performance. Unlike indexes, materialized views are not automatically updated with…
Data Types of Join Columns
The data type of primary key and foreign key columns has an impact on the query performance. This should be considered in the design decision of keys in a Data Vault schema. In a performance review of a customer project, we detected a lot of…
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