Infiniband coming to a town near you

As the Exadata takes off (I've heard it is REALLY taking off), more and more vendors are opening their eyes to the bottleneck of I/O.

You are going to see some other solutions come to the market that are infiniband based. You are also going to see more solutions like the Storage Cell's.. Just look at the IBM XIV ! they have storage cells just like the exadata with large caches. The concept is catching on..

But what does the Exadata have besides the obvious ? It has the ability to parallelize the I/O at the storage level.. I'm sure you going yea. I knew that.. but think about it.

a) Exadata.. run a non-parallel query that does a FTS on a 5tb table. You will marshall all the resources of the I/O from a single query on a single NODE

b) XXXXXX.. Run a non-parallel query, and you only will be able to marshall all the I/O that the single CPU can handle.

Sure you can build an Exadata like solution, but in order to utilze the power of the storage/infiniband subsystem you need to parallelize across multiple CPU's.. This uses a lot of CPU's, and parallization might not be the best plan for all queries.

In my mind, this is big bonus of the exadata.. Parallize or not, you can do FTS's at 20.8g/s

Exadata and indexes

This has been a very interesting topic around my shop.. Some people say that you can get rid of all you indexes, some people say no..

Well first lets look at why you have indexes and rule out those as removal candidates.

1) Indexes that support Primary keys. Gotta keep those right ?

2) Indexes that support RI to avoid locking. OLTP ? Gotta keep those.

For a lot of OLTP applications, just the 2 above criteria is enough to keep most of your indexes in play. But what about everything else.

Here is what I've been seeing. The exadata can scan like crazy, but there is a limit (20.8 on a full rack, do the math for your configuration). If you have a FTS on a table containing 50G, you can see that you utilizing ALL I/O for almost 3 seconds. if you have any concurrency, you can imagin what happens.

So in my mind the answer is to keep indexes where they can significantly limit the data access.

Concurrency.

Now that I've had a few beers, and few cups of coffee, I've had time to arrange brain cells in the right trays.. This is what I've found on Concurency with a table doing a FTS.

First.. single query.. 33g. 1/2 rack does 10.4g/second as advertised.. the single query doing a FTS runs in 3.3 seconds (or so).

Now scale up to 10 processes.. The 10 processes all scour 33.g gig apiece, the time goes up. The secret is to cut down the I/O requests at the DB layer to limit the data scoured.

Concurrency on the Exadata

Now that I have some benchmarks, I'm starting to delve into some testing to find out how it scales up.. I started with a large table 200+ million rows.

My base query did a FTS and returned one row of data.


1 execution runs in 3 seconds (DOP 32).

Once I scale up to 100 simultaneus executions, it runs longer, but I can't figure out the average execution time (parallel query skews the numbers).

In looking at the resource usage for both the database nodes and the storage nodes, I found the database nodes are almost Idle, and the storage nodes (7 of them) are producing about 10g of data/second. The cpu usage is about 7% user and 30% wait. When looking at the AWR information, all the time is still going to I/O waits. 399 seconds out of the 444 seconds are I/O wait times.. It appears that the Exadata does fantastic for a single query.. Once you execute that single query 100 times simultaneously, the times start to slow down.

I'm going to do more experients to see how I can get it to scale up nicer :)

Exadata storage Software

How else should I spend a Friday night, other than drinking hard cider, and running performance numbers on the Exadata storage software.

This is my dive into the storage software and WOW is it impressive.. I am selecting from a 200+ million row table (no indexes).. Without storage software it takes 3 minutes to scan the whole table.. really impressive. Then with the storage indexing it takes 30 seconds to come back with a distinct column value. 6 times faster..

Then I was really impressed when I used a Unique key lookup.. No index, it took 8 seconds to find the data, compared to 189 seconds. 23x faster with the Storage software.

Next I made the table parallel 64.. Now it comes back in 3 seconds (no storage software), and 1 second with storage software.. Unbelievable numbers.

One of the first things I noticed is that the Exadata makes you rethink your redo log sizes. When loading data a lot of my waits are waiting on the redo to flush out because it is so small.

All in all the storage software looks pretty impressive.

Rear view of an Exadata

Why HCC is exadata only

First the Physics.

The SAS drives spinning at 15k rpm's can produce 200m of data/second.Hypbrid Columnar compression get's on average 50x compression rate.200m x 50x = 10g of data PER DISK is read.

There are 100+ disks that can be read. This causes 2 issues.

a) The data is actually compressed/uncompressed at the storage tier. All the CPU's in the storage servers are utilized to make this happen.. Only the exadata can take advantage of the storage CPU's through the storage software

b) The data that is uncompressed is huge.. The disk can return 20.8g of data per second, but if you do get 50x compression, you are now trying to work with 1tb of disk/second..

Even if you are running infiniband, the system can't handle this volume of data.. The predicate elimination, and column eliminate will limit the data returned from the storage tier, making the processes of the data possible.
Without the storage software along with the CPU's at the storage level uncompressing data AND eliminating data, it is impossible to process the volume of data produced from HCC.