Description of the illustration select.gif

The illustration shows the process of selecting and retrieving data from an Oracle Exadata Storage Server. The query SELECT customer_name FROM calls WHERE amount > 200 is entered by a client and sent to the database server. A smart scan is constructed on the database server and sent to the storage servers. The smart scan identifies the rows and columns in the terabyte table at the storage level that match the request. The 2 MB data subset is returned to the database server. The database server builds a consolidate result set using the data from the storage servers, and returns only the data that matches the query to the client.