Oracle Tips  by Burleson Consulting

The Data Warehouse Development Life Cycle

Parallelism And Oracle Data Warehousing Parallel Processing

A continuum of processing architecture exists for parallel processing. On one end of the spectrum, we find a few loosely connected powerful CPUs , while on the other end, we see a large amount of tightly coupled small processors . Parallel tasks can be easily identified in an Oracle data warehouse environment. For the database administrator, routine maintenance tasks, such as export/import operations, can be run in parallel, thereby reducing the overall time required for system maintenance. Also, tasks such as index rebuilding can be run in parallel mode.
In an open systems environment, parallelism may be easily simulated by using a remote mount facility. With a remote mount, a data file may be directly addressed from another processor, even though the data file physically resides on another machine. This can be an especially useful technique for speeding up table replication on remote sites, as shown in Figure 7.3.

Figure 7.3 Parallelism across multiple CPUs.

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This is an excerpt from "High Performance Data Warehousing". To learn more about Oracle, try "Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference", by Donald K. Burleson.  You can buy it direct from the publisher at 30% off here:
http://www.rampant-books.com/book_1002_oracle_tuning_definitive_reference_2nd_ed.htm