How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 73. Dominic

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference of September 1994, I was in the Moscone Center audience of a beautifully performed presentation by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. On stage with Larry were two lecterns, each with a keyboard and a terminal. Behind him were three giant screens. The leftmost lectern and the screen behind it were for Larry in the role of Application User. The rightmost lectern and the screen behind it were for Larry in the role of DBA. Between the lecterns was an exciting new nCUBE computer. We’d heard of the nCUBE, but none of us had ever seen one before. Both lecterns were connected to it. The third screen, positioned between the other two screens, showed a utilization graph for the nCUBE’s CPUs. I think this demo model had 64 CPUs. It might have had a lot more.

Larry began his demo at the User lectern. He showed us a complicated SQL query that he said would take (if I recall correctly) about 2 minutes and 35 seconds to run. Then he ran the query. While it ran, he told us that the reason it took so long was that it needed to scan and process a lot of data. While he was telling his story, the nCUBE computer’s CPU monitor in the middle showed one red bar of solid CPU activity for the duration of the query. He finished his story just in time to gesture toward his screen on the left. Right on cue, his User screen displayed the query result, along with the news that it had consumed 2:35. Simultaneously, the red bar on the CPU monitor went background black. ...