The part of my job I enjoy the most is working with customers to architect solutions. Many times customers are interested in performance solutions that do not require the use of a forklift or a major investment of time. One such solution from EMC is XtremCache: A combination of a PCIe card(s) with SLC or eMLC memory and software. These cards cache nearly all the read requests from inside the server improving response times from milliseconds to microseconds!

These cards are a very good solution for Oracle databases weighted towards reads. This brings me to my question: As an Oracle DBA is it relatively easy for you to determine if the database is weighted towards reads or writes? I would also like to hear any advice you have on determining the read – write profile of the database!