Andrew Sillifant

True Cache on Oracle 26ai

Most database shops have a caching layer. Redis, Memcached, something custom. Reads hit the cache, misses hit the database, and someone owns the invalidation logic, the TTLs, and the 2 AM incident when the cache goes stale. Oracle 26ai introduces True Cache, and it works nothing like Redis. It’s a diskless, read-only database replica that […]

True Cache on Oracle 26ai Read More »

Hybrid Analytics with Oracle 26ai and S3 Data

Oracle 26ai can join external tables backed by S3 Parquet files with regular internal tables in a single SQL statement, without data movement, ETL pipelines, or Spark. The optimizer treats S3-backed external tables as another data source and picks the right join strategy automatically. This post shows how to build a customer dimension table from

Hybrid Analytics with Oracle 26ai and S3 Data Read More »

HammerDB-Scale 2.0 and Why I Rebuilt the Whole Thing

I spent months building a tool that answers a question nobody else was asking: how many databases can your infrastructure actually handle before something breaks? HammerDB-Scale orchestrates parallel database benchmarks on Kubernetes, correlates application metrics with storage behaviour, and finds consolidation limits. I also overengineered it for the wrong user experience. But I thought it

HammerDB-Scale 2.0 and Why I Rebuilt the Whole Thing Read More »

Querying Parquet Files on S3 with DBMS_CLOUD in Oracle 26ai

TL;DR: DBMS_CLOUD.CREATE_EXTERNAL_TABLE creates an external table that reads Parquet directly from S3. Define the table once, query it with standard SQL. No data loading, no ETL. With S3 connectivity working (Part 1 and Part 2), this post shows how to create DBMS_CLOUD external tables over Parquet files in S3 and query them from Oracle 26ai.

Querying Parquet Files on S3 with DBMS_CLOUD in Oracle 26ai Read More »

Solving DBMS_CLOUD Connectivity with S3-Compatible Storage

TL;DR: DBMS_CLOUD fails with non-AWS S3 because it parses hostnames to select the signing algorithm and extract the AWS region. Fix: point s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com at your endpoint via DNS, add it as a SAN on the endpoint’s TLS cert, and import the cert into an Oracle wallet. Full DBMS_CLOUD functionality, no file downloads. In Part 1,

Solving DBMS_CLOUD Connectivity with S3-Compatible Storage Read More »