July 2014

• Data growing, storage costs too high, decided to roll out subsetting
• App teams and IT Ops teams had to coordinate and manage the complexity of the  shift to subsets in dev/test
• Scripts had to be written to extract the correct and coherent data, such as correct date ranges and respect referential integrity
• It’s difficult to get 50% of data 100% of skew instead of  50% of data 50% of skew
• Scripts were constantly breaking as production data evolved requiring more work on the subsetting scripts
• QA teams had to rewrite automated test scripts to run correctly on subsets
• Time lost in ADLC, SDLC to enable subsets to work (converting CapEx into higher OpEx) put pressure
  

So 12.1.0.2 is out with a number of interesting new features, of which the most noisily touted is the “in-memory columnar storage” feature. As ever the key to making best use of a feature is to have an intuitive grasp of what it gives you, and it’s often the case that a good analogy helps you reach that level of understanding; so here’s the first thought I had about the feature during one of the briefing days run by Maria Colgan.

“In-memory columnar storage gives you bitmap indexes on OLTP systems without the usual disastrous locking side effects.”

Preface

In this post you’ll see that I provide an scenario of accidental paid-feature “use.”  The key elements of the scenario are: 1) I enabled the feature (by “accident”) but 2) I didn’t actually use the feature because I neither created nor altered any tables.