Delphix

If you’re a regular follower or my blog you may recall Kyle Hailey and the joint webinar we did nearly two years ago on “Visual SQL Tuning” covering an approach I’ve written about in the past and a product that he developed at Embarcadero to automate the work that I’d been doing by hand and eye.

Kyle has now moved on to Delphix, and has become involved with another really interesting piece of technology – database virtualization. How do you supply a terabyte sized database to five different development teams without using up 5TB of disc space ? Create an operating environment that keeps one master copy of the database while maintaining a set of (small) private files for each team that hold private copies of the blocks that have been changed by that team – and that’s just one feature of the product.

The product is sufficiently interesting (plus I have a healthy regard for Kyle’s opinions) that I’ve accepted an invitation to go over to California for a few days next month to experiment with it, see what it can do, try to stress it a bit and so on. The people at Delphix are so confident that I’ll be impressed that they’re going to let me do this and then write up a blog telling you how things went.

Have a browse around their documentation and if you’re interested add a suggestion to the comment telling me what you’d like me to test, and how, and I’ll see if I can fit it into my timetable (no promises – but if you come up with interesting ideas I’ll see what I can do).