Deep Dive into Oracle Exadata Smart Scan: The Secret Sauce of Performance

If you are running workloads on Oracle Exadata, you are likely sitting on a goldmine of performance capability. The most significant differentiator between Exadata and traditional storage architectures is a feature called Smart Scan (also known as Cell Offload Processing). Instead of treating storage as dumb disks that just serve blocks to the database, Exadata pushes SQL processing down to the storage tier. This article explains how Smart Scan works, how to verify it, and how to control its behaviour for testing. ...

February 21, 2026 · 6 min · mardaff

Oracle Exadata X11M: Architecture and Hardware Specifications

The Exadata X11M platform separates database compute and storage cells connected via an RDMA-capable RoCE fabric. This page summarizes hardware variants and provides practical command-line examples for common administration, troubleshooting and monitoring tasks. Architecture Overview Database Servers (Compute) These servers run the database and client-facing workloads. Standard Exadata X11M Database Server CPU: 2x 96-core AMD EPYC 9J25 (192 physical cores) Memory: 6400 MT/s DDR5, 512 GB–3 TB Local storage: 2x 3.84 TB NVMe (OS / Oracle binaries) Exadata X11M-Z Database Server (Entry) ...

February 21, 2026 · 3 min · mardaff