In the third part of this blog post series about star schema design, let’s have a look at a powerful, but for many people still unknown feature: Oracle Database In-Memory enables massive performance improvements for typical data warehouse queries.
One of the extensions in Oracle 20c is the possiblity to use the In-Memory Database option for Partitioned External Tables and Hybrid Partitioned Tables. In my opinion, this opens up many possibilities to perform efficient ad-hoc queries on Data Lakes. That’s why I prepared a demo script for my DOAG presentation about SQL features in Oracle 20c. Unfortunately, it turned out differently than planned. A drama in four acts.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud does not allow to create indexes. Is this a problem for star schemas because no Star Transformation can be used? Or are the required bitmap indexes automatically created? A look under the hood of ADWC.
Hash keys are often used as primary keys in Data Vault environments. When loading dimensional data marts from a Data Vault schema, it seems to be obvious to use them as dimension keys, too. At least in combination with Oracle Database In-Memory, this is not a good idea.
With Oracle Database In-Memory, it is possible to populate individual columns of a table into the In-Memory Column Store. This is very useful for large tables, if only the frequently used columns should be populated to safe memory. The SQL syntax to define this seems to be straight-forward, but does not always work as expected.
Virtual Columns in Oracle are a convenient feature to implement derived measures of a fact table. But in combination with Oracle Database In-Memory, it has an impact on performance – unless you use Oracle 12c Release 2.
Data Warehousing with Oracle 