Oracle Development Survey on Data Warehouses: How Does Yours Compare? Here's how to find out!

At the start of most data warehouse projects, or even during a project, I am sure you as customers try to find answers to the following questions to help you plan and manage your environments:

• Where can I find trend and comparison information to help me plan for future growth of my data warehouse?
• How many cpu's do other customers use per terabyte?
• How many partitions are typically used in large tables? How many indexes?
• How much should I allocate for memory for buffer cache?
• How does my warehouse compare to others of similar and larger scale?

The data warehouse development team, here at Oracle would like to help provide answers to these questions. However, to do this we need your help. If you have an existing data warehouse environment, we would like to obtain more technical information about your environment(s) by running a simple measurement script and returning the output files to us, here at Oracle. This will allow our developers to provide comprehensive documents that explain best practices and get a better understanding of which features our customers use the most. This will also allow you as Customers, to benchmark your environments compared to other customers’ environments.

From a Company perspective we are also interested to get feedback on features we have added to the database, are these features used, how are they used etc. For example we are keen to understand:

• Which initialization parameters are most frequently used at what values?
• How many Oracle data warehouses run on RAC? on single nodes?
• Is there a trend one-way or the other, especially as data volumes increase?
• Does this change with newer releases of the database?

All results from these scripts will be held confidential. No customers will be mentioned by name; only summaries and trends will be reported (e.g., “X percent of tables are partitioned and Y percent are indexed in data warehouses that are Z terabytes and larger in size.” or “X percent of Oracle9i and Y percent of Oracle10g data warehouses surveyed run RAC”). Results will be written up as a summarized report. Every participating customer will receive a copy of the report.

Terabyte and larger DW are the primary interest, but information on any data warehouse environment is useful. We would like to have as many customers as possible submit results, ideally by the end of this week. However, this will be an on going process so regular feedback after this week is extremely useful.

To help our developers and product management team please download and run the DW measurement script kit from OTN which is available from the following link:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/10g/dw_survey_0206.html


Please return the script outputs using the link shown on the above web page, see the FAQ section, or alternatively mail them directly to me: keith.laker@oracle.com.