Optimizing Oracle Databases at a Global Airline

Oracle Database is one of Oracle’s flagship products, helping organizations of all sizes and industries efficiently store and organize vast quantities of information. It’s no surprise that according to one survey, 51 percent of Fortune 100 companies use Oracle as their primary database.

 
One such Fortune 100 company is the client in our recent case study: a major global airline company undergoing serious design and performance issues with its Oracle applications, including Oracle Database. Like many Oracle applications and other enterprise software, Oracle Database can be difficult to manage and experience performance issues that hold you back from reaching your full potential.

By partnering with Datavail, the client was able to reduce and eliminate their challenges with Oracle Database, enabling them to get better insights and make smarter business decisions.

Interested in the full story about how we did it? Check out our case study “Major Global Airline Lowers Costs and Maximizes Data Insights with Datavail Partnership.” Below, we’ll pass on a few handy tips and tricks for optimizing your Oracle Database installation.

How to Optimize Oracle Database

If you want to learn how to optimize Oracle Database, the first place to look is at the software version that you’re running and the infrastructure that it’s running on.

Before reaching out to Datavail, the client in this case study was running Oracle Database 12c Standard Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 64-bit Production on Linux operating systems. While the software was relatively up-to-date, however, the underlying infrastructure was not.

The client’s deployment of Oracle Database was storing 800 million records dating back 5 years, and 1.8 billion records in total dating back 10 years. With so much information accumulating within the database over time, the client’s legacy infrastructure had simply grown incapable of efficiently storing and handling this data.

What’s more, the client’s installation of Oracle Database 12c lacked several useful features that could have reduced performance issues. In particular, the client’s version of Oracle Database 12c lacked advanced tuning features and built-in parallelism. Techniques such as table partitions, bitmap indexes, and columnstore indexes were similarly absent.

Another good tip for optimizing Oracle Database: get the metrics and KPIs you need to make an informed decision. You may feel it in your bones that the database is running more slowly than usual, but you need cold, hard data to support your intuition. Performance monitoring software can provide insights about factors such as CPU and memory usage that hint at underlying issues.

Once you have a good sense of your IT situation, and the facts and figures to back it up, get in touch with a skilled managed services provider like Datavail.

Global Airline Database Challenges

In this case study, Datavail redesigned the client’s database with an eye toward optimizing performance. This included adding materialized views and executing them in the background, preferring simple SQL queries, and creating indexes where necessary. We also helped the client execute jobs in parallel rather than serially by using the Oracle Scheduler software.

Oracle Database usually isn’t at peak efficiency when you run it right out of the box. The good news is that there are clear best practices to follow when optimizing your Oracle Database installation.