The Art of Sizing — Series
Categories: Databases · Oracle · AI and Machine Learning
By Thomas Stutesman, Principal Field Solutions Architect, Everpure
A migration readiness scorecard turns raw Oracle AWR telemetry into seven plain-language signals — and shows you exactly where a lift-and-shift would carry yesterday's problems into tomorrow's platform.
The migration everyone is planning for
Across the industry, many organizations are now looking to move to Oracle AI Database 26ai. The release promises autonomous efficiency, AI-driven insight, and native vector search — but for most teams the path forward is clouded by one uncomfortable question: is our current infrastructure sized for tomorrow, or are we carrying the weight of yesterday's inefficiencies?
The 26ai Migration Readiness scorecard is one of the helpful tools Everpure has created to make that migration easier. It takes the telemetry you already have — your Oracle Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) reports — and translates it into a clear, consistent read on where each database stands, so you move with evidence instead of assumptions.
This is the first idea in our Art of Sizing series: for a decade, cheap flash and fast cores let us over-provision and "throw hardware at it." Oracle 26ai — with real vector workloads and a hardware market where components cost more and take longer to arrive — ends that era. Disciplined sizing is back, and it starts with reading the right signals.
What the scorecard shows
Point the assessment at an estate and it produces a single view: every database, scored across seven signals, rolled up into a combined readiness score. In one illustrative example across eight databases, the combined readiness score was 118 out of 168 — with 0 Ready, 7 Caution, and 1 Risk. None were a clean lift-and-shift: seven needed validation and tuning, and one needed remediation before it could move.
Each database is scored across the seven signals with a simple traffic light, and the lights roll up into a score out of 21 — seven signals, three points each:
- Ready — 3 points — inside the healthy threshold
- Caution — 2 points — worth validating
- Risk — 1 point — attend to before you move
A score of 18–21 is favorable, 13–17 means review needed, and below 13 flags remediation. Think of it as a current-state indicator that tells you where the risk concentrates — not a migration certification.
A red flag doesn't mean "cannot migrate." It means the problem will follow you into 26ai — or get worse — if you size the new environment from the old box instead of from the evidence.
The seven signals, one by one
These are the value items to worry about when sizing for and moving to 26ai. For each, here is what it reads from AWR, why it drives your target design, what a red is telling you, and how Everpure helps you act on it.
Signal 01 — System Capacity
Reads DB Time against available CPU cores, average active sessions, and host CPU pressure. This sets the compute floor for the target and drives per-core Oracle licensing — size to the old ceiling and you inherit the old bottleneck. On top of that, 26ai's vector and embedding work adds fresh CPU demand.
Red means: the source is already CPU-bound; moving as-is relocates the constraint. You need real headroom, not a like-for-like footprint.
How Everpure helps: the assessment reports peak (not averaged) CPU demand per database and translates it into a right-sized core count — so the target is provisioned for the real workload plus deliberate headroom, and licensing is planned rather than guessed.
Signal 02 — SQL & Parse
Reads hard-parse rate, literal (non-bind) SQL, library-cache and cursor-sharing behaviour. 26ai changes optimizer behaviour, so heavy hard-parsing burns CPU, pressures the shared pool, and invites plan regressions on the new release.
Red means: application-level SQL that will keep burning CPU or regress on cutover. Plan-stability work (SQL Plan Management, baselines) and shared-pool sizing belong before the move.
How Everpure helps: because the assessment looks at the whole estate, not one instance, it surfaces shared SQL/parse patterns across databases — so one remediation effort (often "add bind variables") protects many migrations and lowers the CPU you have to size and license for.
Signal 03 — Wait Profile
Shows how DB Time splits across CPU, I/O, concurrency, and commit/log waits. It tells you what kind of bottleneck you are actually sizing for — a commit-bound database and an I/O-bound one need very different target designs.
Red means: DB Time is dominated by a problematic wait (log file sync, buffer busy, latch/enqueue). Sizing CPU or storage without addressing it just moves the pain.
How Everpure helps: Everpure maps the dominant wait class to the right lever — low, predictable write latency on FlashArray for commit/log waits; CPU or memory changes for concurrency waits — so the target attacks the real bottleneck instead of over-buying everywhere.
Signal 04 — I/O Profile
Reads read/write IOPS, throughput, block size, and latency. This is the direct input to storage sizing, and it separates latency-sensitive OLTP from bandwidth-driven scan/DW workloads — which size very differently. Averages hide the peak windows that actually test the array.
Red means: real I/O demand the target tier must sustain. Under-provision here and everything above it — waits, capacity, response time — degrades.
How Everpure helps: the assessment moves beyond averages to hour-by-hour peak-window analysis and turns it into a concrete IOPS/throughput/latency target for FlashArray — sub-millisecond and consistent, so the design performs at peak, not just on paper.
Signal 05 — Memory
Reads SGA/PGA sizing, buffer-cache behaviour, and Oracle's own memory advisories. Right-sizing memory on the target avoids trading RAM savings for a flood of avoidable physical I/O — and under-sized memory quietly inflates the I/O profile, so the two signals move together.
Red means: memory is under-provisioned and driving physical reads that should be cache hits. Size SGA/PGA to demand rather than copying the old config.
How Everpure helps: Everpure correlates memory pressure with observed I/O, so recommendations account for both together — enough memory to cut needless physical reads, and storage sized for what genuinely reaches disk.
Signal 06 — Temp & Work
Reads temp tablespace usage, sort/hash spills, PGA work-area activity, and multipass operations. Analytics, reporting, and AI-adjacent workloads live or die on temp and PGA — and 26ai vector operations add sort/compute patterns you have not sized for before.
Red means: large sorts/hashes are spilling to temp; without PGA and temp sizing, the workload is slow on day one regardless of platform.
How Everpure helps: the assessment quantifies spill behaviour and feeds it into PGA and temp-tier sizing, while FlashArray's consistent low latency keeps unavoidable spill cheap rather than catastrophic.
Signal 07 — Segment Risk
Reads large or fast-growing segments, chaining, LOBs, partitioning, and use of features like TDE, Hybrid Columnar Compression, and Smart Scan. These are the objects that don't migrate cleanly — reorg candidates, feature-compatibility items, and capacity-growth landmines.
Red means: schema-level cleanup, not just capacity: objects that need reorg, or that depend on features the target must be configured to support from day one.
How Everpure helps: Everpure auto-detects active features (TDE, HCC, Smart Scan) so the target is configured for them without over-provisioning, and replaces full clones and legacy triple-copy redundancy with space-efficient snapshots and external redundancy to reclaim capacity.
From evidence to a right-sized migration
The scorecard is the front door. Behind it is an assessment built to turn these seven signals into decisions you can defend to procurement and operations alike. It captures every instance for an ecosystem view, replaces multi-day averages with peak-window analysis, and translates raw metrics into specific storage and configuration recommendations for a 26ai target. It runs privacy-first — hostnames and SQL identifiers are masked, and only the actionable results are shared.
Sometimes the biggest finding is what you don't need to buy. One prospect expected to buy 200 TB. The workload needed 18 TB. The gap was legacy ASM high-redundancy (three data copies) plus full clones for dev/test. Moving to Oracle-recommended external redundancy on Everpure and space-efficient snapshots reclaimed roughly two-thirds of the footprint and eliminated over 180 TB of wasted capacity — exactly the kind of trap that nameplate-based sizing would have locked in.
From there, a right-sized design lands on a platform built for database density: Everpure FlashArray//XL R5 delivers sub-millisecond, consistent latency and industry-leading data reduction that absorbs vector growth economically. Pure Fusion presets encode your sizing discipline once so every 26ai environment is provisioned the same way, and Pure1 adds fleet-wide performance, capacity forecasting, and application-level context.
A sizing-first path to 26ai
- Assess. Send your AWR reports; the 26ai Readiness Assessment is generated automatically, with identifiers masked.
- Interpret the signals. Reds are the pre-migration punch list; cautions are the validate list. Watch for fleet-wide patterns.
- Remediate reds first. Fix CPU, SQL/parse, dominant waits, and segment issues before cutover.
- Right-size the target. Size compute, memory, temp/PGA, and storage to the measured peak — and strip out redundancy and clone inflation.
- Provision consistently. Use Pure Fusion presets so every environment is built to the same standard.
- Validate with a pilot. Confirm behaviour against a representative pilot and target telemetry before scaling the wave.
Summary
Oracle 26ai brings back the art of sizing. The 26ai Migration Readiness scorecard reads seven signals from your AWR data — System Capacity, SQL & Parse, Wait Profile, I/O Profile, Memory, Temp & Work, and Segment Risk — so you can remediate the reds, right-size the target to your real workload, and move to 26ai with confidence instead of guesswork.
Know where you stand — send us an AWR report, and Everpure's Oracle experts will run the 26ai Readiness Assessment on your environment and walk you through the seven signals, your remediation punch list, and a right-sized target design.
The readiness score is an AWR-derived, current-state indicator to guide investigation and planning. It is not a migration certification, a final target-platform sizing, or a target-array headroom calculation — those decisions require workload requirements, target telemetry, compatibility checks, and a representative pilot. Database figures shown are illustrative. Oracle is a trademark of Oracle Corporation. © 2026 Everpure, Inc.
