Below are answers to questions asked during the recent webinar.
Q. Is Oracle doing Exadata patching or your team?
A. Yes, Oracle is currently handing everything related to Exadata at Cardinal Health.
Q. What is cost saving after the Exadata migration?
A. The exact cost savings was not specified, but Cardinal has realized cost savings and other benefits by:
- eliminating 20+ Unix servers and the floor space/power/management related to them
- also, Cardinal.com can do many more product searches now which has led to more revenue from the site
Q. Oracle recommends hiding indexes rather then dropping them when doing performance tuning in Exadata. Did Cardinal Health hide indexes or drop them?
A. Bronwyn talked about removing some indexes to help performance once they move to Exadata. The first step was to hide these indexes while performance testing was done. Once performance testing completed the indexes were removed eventually for space savings.
Q. If a query accesses data via an index, would it use a Smart Scan?
A. Smart scans only work for specific operations like table and index scans and here are the three basic requirements:
- there must be a full scan of an object (TABLE ACCESS FULL or INDEX FAST FULL SCAN, etc in plan)
- the scan must use direct path reads
- the object must be stored in the Storage Servers
Q. What version of Oracle is Cardinal on?
A. 11.2.0.2
Q. How is DBRM working in Exadata? We had issues with DBRM as we were running into resmgr:cpu quantum waits
A. After some trial and error DBRM is not working well at Cardinal. If you are seeing “resmgr: cpu quantum waits” this means that DBRM is doing what you told it to do and is throttling your CPU resources. Increase the amount of CPU available to the user experiencing the issue.
Q. Do you spend a lot of time chasing down bugs via Service Requests?
A. Cardinal has not had any more issues with bugs in Exadata than other Oracle platforms.
Q. Is there any feature that can be utilized to speed up the RMAN backup ?
A. Exadata will inherently offload RMAN backup processing to the storage servers rather than the database server in a non-Exadata environment. Based on several Oracle Exdata whitepapers, full image copies achieved over 7TB / hour and 10-48 TB for incremental backups.
Q. What is the primary work load, data warehousing/reporting or OLTP?
A. A little of everything. The primary performance boost was achieved on Cardinal.com which is an OLTP order entry system. However, reporting and data warehousing applications have also benefited greatly.