Exadata Smart Flash Cache

Oracle marketing must really like the term smart. They have applied it to numerous different features on the Exadata platform. They also seem to like the term flash, which is associated with at least a half dozen features as well. To add to the confusion, there are two features in Oracle Database 12c Release 1 that have almost exactly the same names—Database Smart Flash Cache (DBFC) and Exadata Smart Flash Cache (ESFC). While both features make use of flash-based memory devices, they are very different. In this chapter, we will focus on ESFC and the OLTP optimizations and only mention DBFC in passing.