Oracle Advanced Compression

Oracle Advanced compression is a database option which from Oracle 11G finally getting to work in a more proper way than before. Oracle Advanced Compression can help you lower your storage costs by compressing the data in your database or as Oracle like to state it: "Advanced Compression, an option introduced in Oracle Database 11 g Enterprise Edition, offers a comprehensive set of compression capabilities to help organizations reduce costs, while maintaining or improving performance. It significantly reduces the storage footprint of databases through compression of structured data (numbers, characters) as well as unstructured data (documents, spreadsheets, XML and other files). It provides enhanced compression for database backups and also includes network compression capabilities for faster synchronization of standby databases."

Oracle advanced compression is a payed option in your database, for the latest pricing you can refer to the Oracle Global Pricelist which can be downloaded from the Oracle website. As this is a payed option you have to be sure that you will be able to get your return on investment before you begin. To be able to build a business case for purchasing Oracle Advanced Compression Oracle is providing us with some tools which you can run on your database to check the level of compression you can establish. The "compression advisor" which you can download at the Oracle website needs to be compiled into your database is providing you some basic information and still needs a lot of manual labor in running it on your entire database and after that some time needs to be spend on understanding and calculating the results before you can use them in your business case to validate your ROI of this database option.

For a resent project at Capgemini I have been developing a more robust and more usable implementation of the Oracle Compression Advisor in combination with a default calculation to calculate your ROI and helping you to generate a business case. If you are interested in looking into the options of Oracle Advanced Compression in your database, please feel free to contact me. The current version of the "Improved Compression Advisor" is currently still in testing at the moment I write this document and needs some manual steps of moving the results into excel however this is about to change within the coming weeks and it will most likely be placed online under a GNU/GPL license model.

For more information on advanced compression a large amount of information can be found online in the form of Documentation from Oracle also some good video's from speeches are posted online;  Christina Horsoe uploaded a video to vimeo with a presentation on a case study done by DSP. You can see the video below, the comment they provided to the video is the following. It is quite nice to have a quick look if you where not able to join the presentation yourself.

"Our case study is what the customer has termed a “Next Generation” Billing Project at a leading European Telecoms company. The system was required to consolidate billing in the 13 different countries around the world and needed to be available 24/7. . The database is multi-terabyte containing billions of Call Data Records.

The presentation will take a look at three significant challenges the project had to overcome and illustrate how that the Oracle Partitioning and the Oracle Advanced Compression Options’ was utilised to solve them. Oracle partitioning was used to partition the data simplifying the necessary archival process leading to £18,000 per month storage savings. Our performance challenge was met using partition pruning and also partition-wise joins, which led to performance improvements of over 100 times.

Finally, Oracle Advanced Compression was tested and proved to achieve storage saving of 2.8 to 1 resulting in a £77,000 saving in the first year."

OracleVideo has posted a short video on youtube which also is concerning Oracle Advanced Compression named "Storage Management with Oracle Database 11g"

If you are in need of more information or want to discuss more details and options on lowering your storage costs and implementing Oracle Advanced Compression please feel free to contact me via mail or send me a direct twitter message asking me to contact you.

Posted via email from Johan Louwers posterous page by Johan Louwers.