storage efficiency in oracle database

[Jackiez]

Hi, expert , Would you share some experience for storage efficiency in oracle database ? Customer wanna achieve 3:1 ONTAP storage efficiency. Rgds, Jackie

[TMACMD]

For starters, make sure they are not encrypting their databases. That’s a sure way to get ZERO efficiencies. The whole point of encryption is to eliminate patterns in data which is what efficiencies 100% count on

[Jackiez]

Thanks, TMACMD!

[dkrenik]

 There's a whole lot of "it depends" here...

Are the workloads on these DB's transactional?  Analytical?  What options to the Oracle DB (assuming Enterprise Edition) is the customer utilizing?  Etc.

[Jackiez]

Hi,  Drenik,

         Yes, the workload is transactional  Oracle EE .

[steiner · Accepted solution]

If the data isn't already encrypted or compressed, then 3:1 is about the median. As Dave said, it's also a lot of "It depends". We evaluated some internal production datafiles here at NetApp, taken at random, and we found between 2:1 ands 6:1 efficiency. 

We've also had customers with a lot of datafiles that didn't have blocks, and that sort of data gets about 80:1 efficiency because that gets stored is the datafile block header/trailer.

We also had a support case a while back where efficiency was basically 1:1. It wasn't compressed, it was just a massive index of flat files stored elsewhere. It was an extremely efficient way to store data that was also super-random. Conceptually, it was like compressed data, but it wasn't "compression" as we know it. 

[Jackiez]

Hi Steiner,

        Thank you for such profound explanation !  Very useful guidance for my further moving !

Rgds,

Jackie