Oracle® DBA Guide to Data Warehousing and Star Schemas

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Far too often, people have the expectation that using expensive hardware is the only way to obtain optimal performance from their data warehouse. They'll spend a lot of money to throw both hardware and software at their performance problems, including items such as:

• More memory

• Faster CPUs

• Newer CPUs

• 64-bit CPUs

• Multi-CPU servers (symmetric multi-processing [SMP] or massively parallel processing [MPP])

• 64-bit UNIX

• 64-bit Oracle

• RAID disk arrays (storage area network [SAN] or network-attached storage [NAS])

• More disk array memory cache

• Faster disk drives (e.g., 15,000 RPM)

• More disks (i.e., switch RAID-5 to RAID-1+0)

• RAW^[1] devices

  ^[1] There are two common kinds of operating file systems: cooked and raw. With cooked file systems, the ...