*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…

*Previously on the Microsoft Tech Community Data Architecture Blog A number of our customers and my peers have asked me how to use the Excel sizing template to estimate an Oracle workload without access to the AWR.  This is actually quite easy to do with Oracle Statspack. The statspack report is the predecessor to the Automatic Workload Repository,(AWR).  It is also the option for those databases that are Oracle standard edition or are enterprise edition but haven’t licensed the diagnostic management pack.  This product requires a manual installation that requires either manual snapshots be taken or scheduling via cron or another scheduler. …

*Previously on the Microsoft Tech Community Data Architecture Blog There are considerable focus areas to infrastructure that the IaaS DBA needs to be aware of, so Part I of this blog can be found here. Now that we’ve covered storage and VM series in Part I of this blog post on Infrastructure, we can go onto the detail areas for performance.  Let’s start on performance gains with host caching. Cache it Out Right Host caching, by default, for premium SSD is turned off.  This is a feature only available on certain VM series, (look for an ‘S’ in the D, E…

*Previously on the Microsoft Tech Community Data Architecture blog Those responsible for data will tell you that no matter what they do, at the end of the day, they’re value is only seen when the customer can get to the data they want.  As much as we want to say this has to do with the data architecture, the design, the platforming and the code, it also has to incorporate the backup, retention and recovery of said data, too. Oracle on Azure is a less known option for our beloved cloud and for our customers, we spend considerable time on…

*Previously on the Microsoft Data Architecture Blog in the Tech Community An an Oracle SME at Microsoft, it’s always important to find new ways to make the few of us that specialize in Oracle scalable.  One of those is to find ways to provide documentation, blog posts and tools available to others so they can do some of the work we’re commonly brought into. Infra vs. the RDBMS It’s a standard practice in a lift and shift to simply take the existing server and move it to the cloud.  This is rarely the best approach with an Oracle database, but…

*Updated 03/10/2022 This is a consistent question I receive often and although RAC isn’t supported in any third-party cloud by Oracle, it’s an important topic as more workloads lift and shift to Azure and there is absolutely a reason to have or not to have Real Applications Clusters, (RAC) as part of them.  The only current option for RAC on Azure available is: Flashgrid using Azure VM Images in IaaS The goal of this post is to push past the idea that a lift and shift should always be a 1:1 move.  It’s important when moving to the cloud to use…

There are only a few Oracle on Azure SMEs out there.  OK, let’s be honest, the majority of the brain power is living in one floating home in Portland, Oregon and that’s not a good thing in many ways. It’s always difficult to specialize in a non-native solution at any company, but Microsoft is such an awesome place to be employed and our work is so critical to the overall success to Azure migrations that I’m very happy to do what I do. To help scale, I blog whenever I can on the questions that I most commonly end up…

When migrating an Oracle database to another platform, there are the common indicators and discussion topics around PL/SQL conversions, data types, application rewrites, etc., as being roadblocks to refactoring, but being successful also has to do with the SIZE of the workload coming from Oracle.  I find this is often dismissed, even though this is one of the quickest ways to identify if an ENTIRE Oracle database, (not even by schema or a subset of the Oracle database) can run on a Platform as a Service, (PaaS) solution. The following post involves limits for each Azure PaaS solution and how…