Tag Archives: bus
Column-oriented Part 1: The I/O Advantage
Column-oriented Database Management Systems (CDBMS), also referred to as columnar databases and CBAT, have been getting a lot of attention recently in the data warehouse marketplace and trade press. Interestingly, some of the newer companies offering CDBMS-based products give the impression that this is an entirely new development in the RDBMS arena. This technology has actually been around for quite a while. But the market has only recently started to recognize the many benefits of CDBMS. So, why is CDBMS now coming to be recognized as the technology that offers the best support for very large, complex data warehouses intended to support ad hoc analytics? In my opinion, one of the fundamental reasons is the reduction in I/O workload that it enables. (more…)
Hitting the Batch Wall, Part 2: Hardware Scaling
This is the second installment of my multi-part blog series on “hitting the batch wall.” Well, it’s not so much about hitting the batch wall, but what you can do to avoid hitting the wall. Today’s topic is “throwing hardware” at the problem (a.k.a. hardware scaling). I’ll discuss the common approaches and the tradeoffs of hardware scaling with Informatica software.
Before I can begin to discuss hardware scaling, I start with this warning: faster hardware only improves the load window situation when it resolves a bottleneck. Data integration jobs are a lot like rush hour traffic, they can only run as fast as the slowest component. It doesn’t make any sense to buy a Ferrari if you will always be driving behind a garbage truck. In other words, if your ETL jobs are constrained by the source/target systems or I/O or even just memory, then faster/more CPUs will rarely improve the situation. Understand your bottlenecks before you start throwing hardware at them! (more…)