Thursday, March 22, 2012

Cooking for Geeks (shameless plug)

I am part of the O-Really Blogger review program, and long, long ago I picked up the book

"Cooking for Geeks" by Jeff Potter  for review. 

This was a fantastic book.. I am both a geek, and cook.  This book does a great job of tying the 2 together.  It not only talks about spices, and ingredients but explains in geekspeak why they work togethor.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book ,and I would recommend it to anyone that is interested in cooking, or at all interested in the chemistry, and biology behind how and why we enjoy foods.

Here is a link to the book.
http://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Hacks/dp/0596805888

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Benchmarks for CPU's

I have been doing some benchmarks on a couple of different systems for LIO's. I have been using Kevin Closson's great SLOB toolkit.  You can find more information about it on his blog here.

I have been looking at 2 different systems, and here are my results
These 2 systems are both HP.

The first is an AMD 6276 server. 2 socket x 16 cores. (465 G7)

./runit.sh 0 40
The awr is posted.

Here is the summary of throughput.
oad Profile              Per Second    Per Transaction   Per Load Profile              Per Second    Per Transaction   Per Exec   Per Call
~~~~~~~~~~~~         ---------------    --------------- ---------- ----------
      DB Time(s):               37.9               46.6       0.00       5.96
       DB CPU(s):               30.3               37.2       0.00       4.76
       Redo size:           15,791.3           19,408.2
   Logical reads:       10,119,426.4       12,437,215.0
   Block changes:               83.4              102.5
  Physical reads:                0.4                0.6
 Physical writes:               11.5               14.1
      User calls:                6.4                7.8
          Parses:                3.0                3.7
     Hard parses:                0.1                0.1
W/A MB processed:                0.2                0.2
          Logons:                0.1                0.1
        Executes:           39,333.0           48,342.0
       Rollbacks:                0.0                0.0

I then looked at the new Intel E7 2870 I got.  2 socket 10 core, dual threaded (BL620 E7)

./runit.sh 0 43

the awr is here
Load Profile              Per Second    Per Transaction   Per Load Profile              Per Second    Per Transaction   Per Exec   Per Call
~~~~~~~~~~~~         ---------------    --------------- ---------- ----------
      DB Time(s):               40.9              108.6       0.00       6.93
       DB CPU(s):               37.8              100.4       0.00       6.41
       Redo size:           10,053.3           26,674.3
   Logical reads:       13,203,419.8       35,032,516.8
   Block changes:               36.9               97.9
  Physical reads:                0.0                0.0
 Physical writes:                9.6               25.4
      User calls:                5.9               15.7
          Parses:                4.0               10.7
     Hard parses:                0.0                0.0
W/A MB processed:                0.2                0.6
          Logons:                0.3                0.7
        Executes:           51,300.2          136,114.4
       Rollbacks:                0.0                0.1
    Transactions:                0.4


Look at that throughput.. the 43 process count looks to be the best throughput of over 13 Million LIOS/second

WOW  the new AMD Bulldozer has great numbers, but the intel really Rocks !

Saturday, March 10, 2012

IOUG Real World Performance tour

Last Thursday the Real World Performance Tour came to Rochester, NY.

I know what you're probably thinking. One of 2 things.

1) Why did it come there, aren't you a suburb of NYC (we are actually about a 7 hour drive from NYC)
                   or
2) Why there ?  Did the cows enjoy it ?

We we had a huge turnout. There were about 90 people in attendance.  For this area, that is one of the biggest attendence I have every seen. Especially since it was a paid event, and the lunch was boxed.

The Tour consists of three individuals

1) Tom Kyte... He needs no explaination.

2) Andrew Holdsorth -  Head of the real world performance team.  As a point of full disclosure, I've had a couple of meetings with Andrew in the past, so I already have discussed some of the topics with him in those meetings. 

3) Graham Wood -  Oracle Database Architect in database development.  He is the person responsible for AWR reports.

The day was broken up in 2 halfs.  The morning concentrated on how to manage a data warehouse, and the afternoon concentrated on OLTP.  Of course the approach to both of these areas is different.

The morning covered a number of topics, especially concentrating on the challenges of a data warehouse.

Parallelization
Hash joins vs Nested loops
indexing vs FTS.

Some of the presentation talked about HCC and the exadata, but I would say in general only about 10-20% was exadata specific. No sales pitch, just reasons why it helps..

The afternoon was dedicated to the issues revolving around an OLTP system.  A lot of it covered the material in the youtube video narrated by Andrew on the connections pooling, and how it affects performance.

It was a great day, and there was a lot of great material.. I have talked to Andrew before, and I've seen his videos, but I still got a lot out of the day.

If it is coming to your city, it is definately worth going to.

Here are some links to check out.

Here is Tom's presentation, but like most good presentations, the slides miss a lot.

Here are the Youtube videos from Andrew .. Thanks Andrew for creating these !


And finally, here is the upcoming schedule of events.