Larry Ellison always has something interesting to say during his first keynote of Oracle OpenWorld, and OOW 2013 has been no exception. Larry talked about a new feature for Oracle Database 12c – the in-memory database option – that’s going to allow simultaneous row-level storage (just like we’ve always stored data) and column-level storage (essentially as an in-memory object structure) which will … wait for it! … make the need for non-selective, non-PK indexes irrelevant.
This new feature will be quite simple to implement; all we’ll need to do is
- Set a new initialization parameter (inmemory_size) to an appropriate size
- Identify the tables that we want to leverage IMDO
- Remove any non-selective indexes
- Step back and watch the performance for all queries for those tables increase dramatically
During a live demo on Sunday, Larry remarked this new feature can offer well over 100x query performance improvements; in fact, the demonstrated query performance improvement actually peaked at 1390x for several billion rows queried.
As an Oracle DBA, I am pumped to try this feature out, as I’ve got several clients who can leverage this option immediately, and it offers a compelling reason to consider upgrading to 12c as soon as possible. I talked with several Oracle representatives at the Exhibitor’s Hall yesterday and they told me that IMDO (that’s my acronym for now) will be available in Oracle Database release 12.1.0.2. I’ll keep you posted on IMDO in future posts.
