Virtual DB

I’m heading off to Heathrow airport later on today to fly out to San Francisco for my week of  experimenting with Delphix. I’ve done a little preparation work, of course, including browsing around the Internet to read about related technologies. Some of the material I found was very interesting, so I thought I’d go publish a few of the links that might be useful to other people.

It’s quite surprising to see how long the necessary core technology has been around; and yet there seems to have been minimal follow-up on the possibilities the technology  makes available – perhaps because of the specific  hardware, or special skills needed to put put together a working solution.

Here’s a short series from “Oracle Storage Guy” comparing Netapp and EMC (with a bit of a bias towards EMC)  – it’s a few years old, and the companies mentioned have probably moved on, reviewed strategies, and refined what they do, but I suspect it’s still good background information for the non-specialist.

• Oracle backup – which storage is best – pt.1
• Oracle backup – which storage is best – pt.2
• Oracle backup – which storage is best – pt.3
• Oracle backup – which storage is best – pt.4

And an introduction to some OpenWorld presentations on Oracle’s dbClone from the same person.

A couple of posts by Kevin Closson on NFS and CloneDB

• Direct NFS and CloneDB part 1
• Direct NFS and CloneDB part 1.5

And a posting about Oracle’s clonedb from Tim Hall

• dNFS and CloneDB in 11gR2 

A couple of (fairly long) Oracle white papers on cloning

• Cloning on ZFS with Rman – by Oracle 
• Cloning on ZFS with Data Guard – by Oracle
• See also My Oracle Support article 1210656.1

And, of course, a couple of items from Kyle Hailey (Delphix) that talk about why Delphix is the right solution at the right time. Both items  come with a useful list of links  to articles on other technologoes

• Database Virtualization
• Database Virtualization and Instant provisioning (including video presentation)

Finally, a couple of posts from end-users:

• Delphix – first month
• Deploying outside the box

Bottom line – it looks as if Delphix has created a product that is more flexible, more powerful and easier to use than the competition that has been around for several years, and they’ve done it on generic hardware. I’ll be trying to find out how  reality lines up with expectations over the next week.