At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. My impression, which was confirmed by folks in the Oracle world, is that she knows her way around the Oracle optimizer.
These are my notes from the session, which include comparisons of
how Oracle works (which Maria gave) and how MySQL works (which I
researched to figure out the difference, which is why this blog
post took a month after the conference to write). Note that I am
not an expert on data warehousing in either Oracle or MySQL, so
these are more concepts to think about than hard-and-fast advice.
In some places, I still have questions, and I am happy to have
folks comment and contribute what they know.
One interesting point brought up:
Maria quoted someone (she said the name but I did not grab it)
from …