Tom Kyte in Dublin take aways

Today I had the pleasure to listen to Tom Kyte talk about:
– Big Data and the Oracle perspective and tool set on it
– Database stuff: Statistics
– More database stuff: compression & partitioning
The most interesting part of the speech was the Oracle view on big data. The strategy is coherent and makes a lot of sense. However, I am not convinced why you would ever pay licenses for a NoSQL database or Hadoop? But as I said the strategy itself is sound from my point of view.
There were also one or two things I took away from the database agenda:
– For the best compression results you want to have the columns that share certain values to be sitting beside each other. That way they are more likely to end up on the same database block and compression will be applied to more values. Really only something to take into account for huge tables where you have similar values across columns and you want to squeeze out the last bit of performance.
– CTAS is less expensive than Delete when high enough number of rows are deleted from a table.
The other good thing about the event was to meet up with some of the Dublin Oracle ACEs Marcin Przepiorowski and Brendan Tierney. And of course I also had a pint or two as it was a lovely day in Dublin.