One of the reasons that Oracle became a leader in database technology was their flexible tool set, a group of utilities that allows a database to grow seamlessly from a small departmental system to a giant multinational behemoth. Being the world’s most flexible and robust database, Oracle offers a wide array of tools and techniques for scaling. It is the challenge of the IT manager to apply these tools at the appropriate time to ensure seamless growth while minimizing the investment in hardware resources.
Even though hardware prices fall by a order of magnitude every decade, the investment in computing resources remains a large, critical expense that requires careful management. Hardware depreciates regardless of use, and a “too much too soon” approach can be wasteful. On the other hand, waiting until the system experiences stress related response time delays is also bad, especially since today’s end-user community has very little tolerance for sluggish response time.
The answer is the “scale up, scale out” approach.
This scalability secret allows Oracle database to grow seamlessly from tiny to behemoth. Read below for the trick:
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The secrets of Oracle scalability
Costs of SQL Server vs. Oracle
Microsoft and Oracle are engaged in a price war. Microsoft SQL Server struggles to grow "up" into the midsized database market, while Oracle pushes "down", to server the market for small departmental database systems.
As a result, we are flooded with marketing from both sides. There is some debate in the market about Oracle being too expensive for small users.
Comparing SQL Server to Oracle is like comparing a moped to a Maserati! Oracle is an order of magnitude more flexible and robust that SQL Server.
When comparing the costs of Oracle vs. SQL Server we must remember that it’s not just about features. SQL Server only runs on Intel, no HPUX, no Solaris, no AIX, nothing "industrial strength", with the exception of the UNISYS ES series monster servers.
Read more about the real costs of SQL Server vs. Oracle:
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How tune Oracle SQL remotely
If you use a vendor package with Oracle, you may be one of the thousands of shops that struggle with optimizing and tuning vendor systems that you did not write and cannot change. So, how do you tune SQL when you cannot access the SQL source code.
In traditional SQL tuning, changes are made to re-writing the SQL statement into a more efficient form or by changing the execution plan by adding hints to the select clause. With SQL that hides inside a compiled program, changing the SQL is impossible. In other cases, the software vendor may explicitly prohibit any changes to the source code, you must come up with a creative way to tune the SQL without touching the source code.
Oracle provides a “trick” technique for tuning SQL when you cannot “touch” the source code. Cases where you cannot change the SQL source code include dynamically generated SQL, SQL inside 3rd party vendor packages, and compiled programs with embedded SQL.
Read more below to see examples of tuning SQL when you cannot touch the source code:
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