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eBay's Massive Oracle Database

This presentation by eBay employees Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett (the world's luckiest DBA's, no doubt) have a presentation that shows what's it's like to be the DBA for one of the world's most complex and active Oracle systems.

They demonstrate their divide-and conquer approach for a systems with over 20 billion transactions per day:

• Over 212 million registered users
• Two Petabytes of Data (*)
• 26 billion SQL executions per day
• 99.94% available
• One billion page views per day
• Uses Sun e10k servers

(*) Harvard PhD Curt Monash notes:  "eBay's biggest analytic database is 1.4 petabytes of disk, holding between 1/2 and 1 petabyte of user data, and running (I'm pretty certain) on Teradata."
 

It's interesting to note that eBay uses the scale-out approach, advocated by many large shops.

Most of all, we see that eBay has moved processor-intensive operations out of the database, and all sorting and SQL joins are handled within the application layer, nt the database.

Also common with very large systems, eBay does not employ referential integrity, ostensible because of the overhead, and relies on their application to manage table integrity.