Information Processing Center (IVZ) Reduces Operational Database Resources by More Than 400% Using Data Compression
 
 

Information Processing Center (IVZ) Reduces Operational Database Resources by More Than 400% Using Data Compression

Printer View Printer View

Founded in 1993, Information Processing Center or Informations-Verarbeitungs-Zentrum (IVZ) is a joint facility for public broadcasting institutions. The organization has approximately 80 employees working at its four locations in Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Cologne. As a full-service provider, IVZ operates and supports public broadcasting institutions’ archive systems. During its radio broadcasting database project, 10 radio broadcasters collaborated by sharing one database instance, causing significant challenges for IVZ in updating and backing up an increasingly high-volume of radio broadcasting databases. Data reorganization during normal operations and during upgrade or damage scenarios (export/import processes, backup recovery and recreation of full-text indexes) exceeded acceptable time windows but was absolutely necessary, as partial data reorganization is crucial to maintaining the full-text indexes of the shared database instance, including upgrades of search documents and the full-text index itself.

IVZ deployed Oracle Advanced Compression with Oracle Database 11g to address these challenges. IVZ can now reorganize full-text indexes 400% faster, which is essential as broadcast data in this environment continues to grow exponentially. By compressing CLOB tables, search documents and full-text information, IVZ also improved speeds when working on damage scenarios, resulting in significantly faster data loss recovery. RMAN, export-import processes, and the rebuilding of search documents and full-text indexes have especially improved. The organization has also reduced its storage media usage by more than 50%, resulting in reducing the cost of storage hardware. IVZ also realized backup application acceleration in online and batch transaction processing, and, thanks to this improvement, can now complete essential batch jobs on time, overnight.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Information Processing Center (IVZ)

  • “During our radio broadcasting database project, 10 ARD broadcasters combined databases, producing extreme data volumes that inhibited our ability to obtain realistic run-times for full-text, index reorganization. With Oracle Advanced Compression, we reduced our operational database resource usage by 400%.” – Holger Fritz, Diplom Ingenieur for Information Technology, Information Processing Center (IVZ)

  • Manage extreme broadcasting data volumes while reducing storage media requirements
  • Achieve more effective operational database resource utilization to deal with data reorganization and expansion
  • Incorporate varying damage scenarios (such as exporting a database scheme from a security instance) that are caused by growing data volumes
  • Reduce database back-up times as the 1 terabyte database continues to grow

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Reduced storage media usage during broadcasting production and other scenarios from 1.5 terabytes to approximately 0.7 terabytes, decreasing hardware requirements
  • Obtained clearer search document and information table results with Oracle Advanced Compression’s tablespace, and reduced hardware requirements from 143 gigabytes to 35 gigabytes
  • Reduced operating database resource usage to achieve a significant 66- to 16-hour run-time reduction during recreation of the weekly-broadcast, full-text index in online mode, while consequently reducing the weekly, full-text index optimization process from six to two hours
  • Avoided costly damages to broadcasting data by improving damage scenarios: for example, reloading the 1 terabyte radio production archive in five hours instead of eight hours after broadcast channel database scheme destruction to avoid the danger of broadcasting downtimes

Resources