Tips for Exadata POCs -- Exadata X8-2M , 19C Database Version, Oracle RAT and Data Masking

If you are planning to make a POC on Exadata in these days, there are some things to keep in mind.
In this blog post, I will quickly shed some light on these things and I think you might find them interesting.

As you may already know, the latest generation of Exadata is the 8th generation.. X8-2 and X8-2M.. X stands for Intel, the first number is the generation and the second number is the number of sockets on the database servers: You know this story right? :)

Anyways, in 8th generation, we have actually 2 main models. One of them is Exadata X8-2 and the other one is X8-2M, which has a brighter future.

So if you decide to use X8-2M on your POC,  you'd better do your POC with Oracle Database 19C.
This is because; only 19.3 or greater has full support for the persistent memory commit accelerator. For instance; 18c will not directly use PMEM. It will send a message to the CellSrv, and this will find data in PMEM, so PMEM acts as an extra level of cache. On the other hand; 19c can access PMEM directly via RDMA.

So I think you know what I mean.. This is not a must, but in fact, this is necessary to unleash the performance of Exadata X8-2M.

One other thing to keep in mind is related with Oracle Real Application Testing (RAT)..  

That is , in order to be able to use Database Replay, your source and target databases should be in the same version.. In other words; after a captured workload is pre-processed, it can be replayed repeatedly on a replay system that is running the same version of Oracle Database.

But what about Data Masking? Actually I have never done that, but it can also be done on the fly while doing RAT. 

Sensitive data in database, SQL Tuning Sets and Database Replay workload capture files can be masked uniformly according to the definitions specified by business and regulatory requirements defined in the Data Masking definitions.  So you can perform a capture from production and then replay it securely in a masked non-production environment. 

That is it for now :) This one's was a quick tip. Hope this helps..