Larry yesterday did his keynote here at Oracle Open World introducing the "Oracle(R) Exadata Storage Server". This morning I attended a session about the technical details behind the server. In principal the server works with 8 nodes running RAC on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5. For the storage management ASM is used and since 11.1.0.7 smart scan has been introduced. Smart scan has been designed for very big data sources used in queries, like in Data Warehouses, where tables from tera bytes are common. In principle the following is accomplished using smart scan: (more…)