However, Dues cautioned, “businesses must examine the actual benefits of in-memory, as results may vary based on the use case and database architecture.” There are also questions as to how deep an impact in-memory technology is having on the speed of business. “It’s a mixed bag,” said Krishnamoorthy. “What we have to understand here is that just by switching on this feature, we should not expect it to be a panacea for all the performance issues bogging down the applications of the business.”
In addition, Krishnamoorthy added, “a lot of additional work is required in terms of query tuning and the applications need to be further fine-tuned to take advantage of in-memory.” This means additional costs, she explained. “Businesses need to understand the implications and make a well-informed financial decision if they want to use the Oracle 12c in-memory feature.” They would have to ensure that the benefits arising out of an enhanced acceleration of the application performance far outweigh the financial cost associated in implementing this feature, she noted.
Another technology that promises to speed things up dramatically is the use of all-flash storage arrays, which is becoming a key feature enticing to players within the Oracle ecosystem. The increase in input/output operations per second (IOPS)—upward of 80 times more IOPS based on some studies—“is so mind boggling that every enterprise has to consider shifting their Oracle workloads to flash,” said Peter Eicher, director of product marketing at Catalogic Software. “The cost per raw terabyte is much higher, but all-flash reaps great savings on non-production use cases. Every Oracle Database instance can spawn as many as eight to 10 full copies used for non-production purposes. This enormous overhead can be eliminated with all-flash arrays because near zero-footprint snapshots can be used instead. You can’t drive many simultaneous workloads off hard disk snapshots; you don’t have the IOPs. Flash changes that.”
However, as with many technology solutions, managing these environments is the key challenge, Eicher cautioned, adding that the management overhead may “blow the doors off your budget.” Automation is crucial, said Eicher, who urged Oracle shops and providers to look to Oracle-aware copy data management solutions “that can automate the process of Oracle copy management from creation to access to clean up.”