*Previously posted on the Data Architecture Blog for the Tech Community. IOPs is Overrated, yeah, I said it. How many compute, storage area networks, hard drive vendors and storage services have posted their IOPs capabilities in marketing and didn’t include the throughput (MBPs)?  Why when someone sends me IOPs for an Oracle database do I thank them kindly and ask for throughput? Thank you for asking… IO requests for Oracle can be exceptionally efficient depending on the type of workload.  In this blog post, I’m going to take three, real examples of Oracle workloads and show how different the ratio…

*Previously posted on the Microsoft Data Architecture Blog for the Tech Community. An enterprise cloud, like Azure, handles an incredible variety of workloads and to be successful running Oracle in Azure means you need to know what you’re doing and where the sweet spot is for a relational workload. I don’t want to get too deep here, as Azure Oracle SMEs are both data and infra, which is a hybrid area resulting in us splitting between the two focuses. The Oracle Must-Knows An Oracle database is a complex relational database, but there are terminology and physical architecture that is important…

*Previously posted on the Microsoft Data Architecture Blog for the Tech community. Oracle 19c is the terminal release for Oracle 12c.  If you aren’t familiar with that term, a terminal release is the last point release of the product.  There were terminal releases for previous Oracle versions (10.2.0.4, 11.2.0.7.0) and after 19c, the next terminal release will be 23c.  Therefore, you don’t see many 18c, 20c or 21c databases.  We’ve gone to yearly release numbers, but the fact remains that 19c is going to receive all major updates and continue to be supported unlike the non-terminal releases. Oracle will tell…

*Previously posted on the Data Architecture Blog for the Microsoft Tech Community. Oracle is a unique, high IO, workload beast, but it’s important to recognize it’s more often an ecosystem made up of an Oracle database, applications and often other databases that all must connect, feed and push data to users and each other. When migrating to the cloud, the architecture discussion about what apps will be placed on what VMs, in what region, availability zones and even availability sets occur, but many forget that Azure is an enterprise cloud and as such, is massive in scale, let alone that…

*Previously posted on the Microsoft Data Architecture Blog for the Microsoft Tech Community. One of the best allocations of an Oracle SME specialist at Microsoft is when there is a complex data/infra issue for one of our customers.  We have a unique set of skills, understanding relational workloads along with deep infrastructure knowledge combined to identify issues that may be missed without these skills. For one customer this last week, they were receiving poor IO performance on one of their Oracle databases running on a VM in Azure.  It’s quite easy to just blame storage or scale up the VM,…

*Posted previously on the Data Architecture Blog for the Microsoft Tech Community. This post will address an ongoing licensing myth that has just enough complexity around it, that it really trips up customers and account teams alike. As part of this post we’ll reference my vCPU licensing post, which I’d hoped would help answer this challenge, but for some reason, we still have folks confounded by Oracle sales people who, as sales will do, try to create friction that may cause people to hesitate from doing what they want with their workloads vs. doing what the Oracle sales people want them…

*Previously posted on the Microsoft Data Architecture Blog on the Microsoft Tech Community This white paper provides guidance from beginning to end that can be used by any organization to assess an Oracle workload and begin its journey to successfully migrating it to Oracle on Azure IaaS.  The goal is to centralize all the recommended practices into one document and yes, it will become a Microsoft document eventually, (we’re still in the early stages or redesigning all the Oracle documentation for Microsoft) but the Data Architecture Blog provides me a quick way to get content to customers in a very…

*Previously posted on the Microsoft Data Architecture Blog on the Tech Community. Numerous times I’ve experienced misunderstanding on licensing around constrained vCPU VMs.  Sometimes the confusion is on the term, “constrained”, (I would have named this VM type, “Same CPU, bigger chassis”.) We’ll go over how we can confirm how many vCPU is on the VM, including comparing a standard VM with 16 vCPU and a constrained 8-vCPU with the 16-vCPU chassis, demonstrating the vCPU count validation between both of them. We’ll also discuss the continual confusion around the terms of hyperthreading and multithreading.  Oracle recently updated their documentation around third…

*Previously posted on the Microsoft Tech Community Data Architecture Blog. I get a lot of questions from our field on how the Cloud Architecture and Engineering (CAE) team Oracle SMEs are bringing over so many Oracle workloads to run in Azure so successfully.  One of the biggest hurdles to bringing Oracle workloads into a 3rd party cloud isn’t technology, but licensing hurdles. Oracle doesn’t appear to make it easy, penalizing hypervisor virtualized CPUs.  The reason this doesn’t faze us in the internal team is that we KNOW how on-premises database hosts are sized out for capacity planning.  It is common for multiple…

*Previously posted on Microsoft Data Architecture Blog in the Tech Community Linux really does make the world go around.  I love all OS, having been one of those odd Oracle DBAs to have used Mac, Android, and Windows laptops and while at Oracle, had all the OS outside of Linux that I supported, deeming my work, “the island of misfit projects.” As I’ve been asked multiple times this week about Unix platforms and how they can migrate to Azure, I wanted to get a post out on how our customers are handling migrations from Unix to Linux. We will start…

*Previously Posted on the Microsoft Tech Community Data Architecture Blog If you’re migrating your data estate to Azure, as is normal considering Azure is an enterprise cloud that can be the home for all data, including Oracle, you may wonder what storage solutions there are to support these types of IO heavy workloads.  Maybe you didn’t realize how important storage was to Oracle in the cloud.  Most customers we word with are focused on what vCPU and memory are available in Azure, but for 95% of Oracle workloads, it’s IO that makes the decision on the infrastructure we choose and of that…

*Previously posted on the Microsoft Tech community Data Architecture Blog IaaS (INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE) Cost Optimization for RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems) workloads is a common request. One of the challenges is that many want to just hand this type of task over to infrastructure and call it good. The problem is that when making changes to VM (VIRTUAL MACHINES) series, memory, storage, and configuration on the physical VM, the database, no matter what platform, can adjust to work intelligently with what has been given in hardware resources.  Yes, some RDBMS may be more adaptable than others with changes to infrastructure, but you should assume that having a database specialist as part of the…

*Previously posted on the Microsoft Tech Community Data Architecture Blog For Oracle 19c AWR reports for Multi-tenant DBs on Exadata reports, the %Busy, CPU, Cores, memory and other data isn’t present.  These are vital data points many of us use to determine vCPU calculations in sizing. Never fear- we still have the data provided in the AWR report we received from the customer to fill in these sections or at least calculate the value. Memory, CPU, Cores Most of the missing data is in the Exadata section of the report: How Much CPU is Available? Now, to create gather a…

*Previously Posted on Microsoft Data Architecture Blog in the Tech Community A common conversation for bringing Oracle workloads to Azure always surrounds the topic of Real Application Clusters, (RAC).  As it’s been quite some time since I’ve covered this topic, I wanted to update from this previous post, as with the cloud and technology, change is constant. One thing that hasn’t changed is my belief RAC is A solution for Oracle for a specific use case and not THE solution for Oracle.  The small detail that Oracle won’t support RAC in any third-party cloud is less important than the lack of need for…

*Previously posted on the Microsoft Tech Community Data Architecture Blog, (consolidated from two blogs posts) One of the biggest challenges to IO demands on an Oracle on Azure VM is when customers continue to utilize streaming backup technology like RMAN or import/exports via DataPump in the cloud.  Although it shouldn’t come as a surprise, these two technologies can often be the biggest consumers of IO- more than overall batch or transactional processing. One of the reasons customers migrate to the cloud is the benefit to share infrastructure resources and features at a lower cost, but with sharing those resources, no…