Compression

The Exadata Database Machine produces fairly dramatic performance improvements for an Oracle database. Part of this improvement comes from improved speed and capacity for all components of the machine, from CPUs to the network to the disk drives. Another part of the improvement comes from reducing the demand for resources, which contributes to improved throughput. Compression, in various options, has been a part of the Oracle Database for more than a decade, and compression can improve overall resource utilization by reducing the size of data, which reduces storage costs and I/O operations, in return for some CPU costs for the compression and decompression operations.