Notice to readers:
This is an excerpt of my liveblogging of the Keynote where the Exadata Storage Server was announced.

It is a mix of my comments in real time, and my quotes from things Larry Ellison said that I felt were worthy of mention.

You may be interested in reading more about Oracle’s Exadata platform. I would suggest taking a gander at Oracle’s product page and also reading up on Christo Kutrovsky’s Analysis of the Exadata and Oracle Database Machine announcement from a different point of view.

You may also be interested in the complete liveblog transcript of the keynote which includes my liveblogging of the rather boring HP advertiseynote before the big show.

I also separated out the Oracle Database Machine liveblog if you just want to get to the rest of the juicy stuff.

So here goes with the liveblogging transcript:

Announcing Oracle’s first ever hardware product.

The exadata programmable storage server.

Building intelligence into the storage server.

Allows us to reduce the amount of data.

Confirming HP is the partner.

Storage server does not pass disk blocks back to the database server, it actually passes query results.

Note: A few startups are doing this sort of thing already. They should be totally freaking out right now.

Slide explaining how query processing works in traditional storage.

Stark contrast to a grid of exadata storage servers, with processing ability local to each and every disk drive.

“We actually pass the query from the database server directly into the storage servers.”

Explaining how this works.

This reminds me hugely of kickfire for mysql, but for Oracle.

Cool, they’re provisioning two infiniband pipes per storage server. Nice. 40gbps.

Marc Fielding: “The problem is still the disk drives.”

Larry: 1gb/s per exadata storage server, you can have dozens working in parallel.

Christo: 1gb/s??? that’s not that good.

Immediately available for Linux., will work with any Oracle database.
Available for x86. Christo: “not 64 bit???????”

By the way, I made a bet with Paul Cunningham that Kickfire would fail because of Moore’s law. I wonder if I should bet against this tech too.

More details to come…

I’ll be liveblogging the keynote here along with Marc Fielding, Christo Kutrovsky, Darrin Leboeuf and Luke Davies and Martin Wisniewski.

First observation: I can not believe I can not make this video full screen.

Even Pythian’s flash video player can go full screen.

Introduction time. Safra Katz.

Confirming HP is here as part of the announcement.

So presentation from HP is here first. Weird. Maybe this is a megabucks commercial keynote. Introducting Exec VP Anne Livermore.

“Very very very very very important event for HP. 100000 joint customers.”

Show of hands for HP adoption. A bit lame, she seems disappointed with how many hands are raised. :-)

The video stream is super saturated, the video is super skippy. Hopefully I can understand what’s going on well enough to do this liveblog.

So far it’s completely a vendor advertisement keynote.

“By 2010, more than 1/3 of CEOs and CIOs realize their datacenters will not meet their demand”.

This is not that big a deal according to Marc Fielding. Basically, Duh, 2/3 of datacenter CEOs do not need to invest further to make it through two years, 1/3 does. I agree.

Ugh another advertising slide. I hope there’s something meaty here.

One in six HP servers runs Linux. That’s interesting.

Bragging about HP winning vs. EMC.

HP would be the sixth largest software company in the world if you looked at only software revenue (interesting)

“Transforming the data center”

“True 24×7 lights out automated and energy efficient data center”

I am IMing with Alex Gorbachev who is at the keynote floor.

I asked him:

Paul Vallee
5:44
do you think HP is only going to advertise here?
5:41 PM

or are they part of this x

oracloid11g
5:44
I think they are

I think it’s crazy for Larry to allow HP to announce it then. He will come onstage with them?

Oh my god she’s actually playing an advertisement.

“next generation data center”

Christo: “I think we were too optimistic, thinking it was going to some amazingly cool piece of Oracle software. I’m starting to think we will be disappointed and it will be hardware.”

Alex Gorbachev is twittering live: http://twitter.com/alexgorbachev.

Darrin Leboeuf: “Maybe Oracle bought HP’s services arm!!! LOL”

HP spends 2% of revenue on IT. Interesting. Consolidated 60+ datacenters into 6.
BTW among Pythian’s customers that share such data, I am aware of one large company spending 1.4%.
Not as large as HP though. :-) Maybe there is a cost to scale.

Talking about virtualization now. Still completely unrelated to X as far as I can see.

So far this looks like one of those million dollar advertising keynotes.

29 minutes of this and I’m still awake. I’m pretty proud.

LOL silence…. then “can i have the next chart please”

Christo Kutrovsky: “Can we have the big news now?”
Darrin Leboeuf: “Can we have the next slide please??? please? Next?”

Now she’s talking about EDS. I missed the point as to why?

I guess they’re partnering with EDS on services. All-righty then. This is also not keynote-worthy material.

OK I get it thanks to Martin. HP bought EDS. How did I miss this news? :-)

17:56 Shilling for EDS’ outsourcing. Here’s a tip, choose Pythian instead.

“Performance Optimized Datacenters, our PODs”. Clever.

So HP is following Sun’s lead in container-based datacenters. Way to go.

17:57 Alex Gorbachev: “So boring.”

(Christo suggested I timestamp. All times EST.)

HP working on eliminating copper in computers, replacing with laser+optical, as a power-saving play. Interesting.

18:00 “to wrap up…” woo hoo

Everyone here in my office left except Christo and I. That should paint a picture.

Polite applause.

OK, Larry’s sailboat is on the screen.

“Extreme Performance” . It’s showtime.

Lots of sailboat visuals. Larry loves his sailboat. He seriously loves it. We get it.

18:03 “Ladies and gentlemen, Larry Ellison”

Wow now he’s talking about sailing. Incredible.

OK I’m giving up the sarcasm. The commercial is over and I’m getting ready to get excited.

“next slide please” wow this has not been rehearsed much. Probably because of the secrecy.

Looks like this will be about VLDB. Databases are tripling in size every two years.

“Disk systems today simply can not cope with the amount of data that has to be moved off those drives. We have a huge bandwidth problem”.

“You don’t have to have a 200tb db to start experiencing the slowdowns. 1tb is the elbow of the curve [pretty graph]”

Darrin and Marc are back. I guess it’s getting interesting again.

Two possible solutions:
1. reduce data going through to the storage systems.
2. wider, faster pipes, and more of them.

(reminds me of the bahd).

Announcing Oracle’s first ever hardware product.

The exadata programmable storage server.

Building intelligence into the storage server.

Allows us to reduce the amount of data.

Confirming HP is the partner.

Storage server does not pass disk blocks back to the database server, it actually passes query results.

Note: A few startups are doing this sort of thing already. They should be totally freaking out right now.

Slide explaining how query processing works in traditional storage.

Stark contrast to a grid of exadata storage servers, with processing ability local to each and every disk drive.

“We actually pass the query from the database server directly into the storage servers.”

Explaining how this works.

This reminds me hugely of kickfire for mysql, but for Oracle.

Cool, they’re provisioning two infiniband pipes per storage server. Nice. 40gbps.

Marc Fielding: “The problem is still the disk drives.”

Larry: 1gb/s per exadata storage server, you can have dozens working in parallel.

Christo: 1gb/s??? that’s not that good.

Immediately available for Linux., will work with any Oracle database.
Available for x86. Christo: “not 64 bit???????”

By the way, I made a bit with Paul Cunningham that Kickfire would fail because of Moore’s law. I wonder if I should bet against this tech too.

Second product announcement: The Oracle Database Machine (in partnership with HP).

Specs slides.

8 64-bit servers, 14 exadata storage servers, tons of ram.

Larry: “It will hold really a lot of songs”.

Three year development program.
Custormers:
Amazon, Yahoo, Countrywide, NPD, Quelle

M-Tel: a Bulgarian company, 10-72 times speedup. The worst speedup was 10x.

Alex G: “It’s mainframes!”

Larry: “Next slide”. Martin W: “why doesn’t he have the clicker himself!?”

Christo (a bulgarian) “I can’t believe M-Tel had this and managed to keep it a secret. That’s funny.”

28x P-Series competitive advantage at M-Tel. For half of one.

Darrin L: “Yeah but what’s the price difference. How do you license this!?”

Good questions IMHO. Oracle licenses based on server performance. There is a major problem to be solved there.

TPC-H query set. 30x average speed-up.

They have a paper describing it. Will be intersting to read it.

Christo: “This seems to be parallel-query only! It might be only for data warehouses!”

Larry: “With a conventional array, when you add storage, you don’t add data bandwidth. With this solution, every time you add storage server, you are adding not just disk capacity, but two infiniband pipes, two processors, and more cache”.

Makes Sense. Refer to BAHD again. Man I feel a bit smart right now.

Now bashing Teradata. I guess we’re into the advertising section.

Now Larry is saying how similar this is to Netezza. One processor per disk drive. Christo is saying it’s very similar.

Larry: two big differences:
1. our database machine runs oracle, theirs does not.
2. we lose a drive, ours keeps running, theirs does, their queries stop.
Christo “umm no they don’t they have three way mirroring”.

Great quip: “even I studied about B-Tree indexes in School!” LOL LOL

Slide - comparing vs. Netezza. Clearly this is the company they are targeting.
Oracle’s stuff is bigger and faster and has more cores and faster bandwidth.

Christo: “The question is, does that CPU sort.”

HP Oracle … 650,000 vs. 1.500,000 for Teradata system with less spec.

In the Oracle column, you need to pay the 1.7 mm software license.

Software license for Oracle though… 1.7mm. There is something interesting going on here.

“Even if you pay list for Teradata, it’s cheaper for capacity.”

Next slide……..

Will speed up OLTP as well as data warehousing.

Available today, 10-50x faster than current (in small type) oracle data warehouses”

I must have missed something. How is this not costing more than Teradata?

OK Christo explained, the Oracle system had triple the storage for modestly more cost.

Mark Hurd talking again. Can HP please hire somebody exciting? Maybe exciting is just not what they do.

Adds the fact that these storage servers are “completely open, proliant-based servers”.

I wonder how long this will be HP-only.

Next, I think you’ve listened to me for long enough, now take a moment and listen to this advertising interlude.

My comments: This is definitely a premium play. It will be interesting to follow the developments. It is not at all what I thought it would be, but it is fascinating.

I bet against Kickfire with Paul McCullagh because of Moore’s Law limiting the long-term value of the speed-up. Maybe I was wrong, Larry is betting a lot more money that I am.

Christo: Let me sum it up: This is parallel query being pushed down to the disk.

Christo: I have two words for you: Object Checkpoint.
Basically before you run a parallel query on any object, you have to checkpoint it. This is already there in 10g and is an enabling technology.

Darrin: When you start up an instance, does it start up an instance on the disk server?
Christo: Doesn’t need it, just needs a filter server.

Christo: The question is, does it sort???????? This is extremely important.

Christo: My first guess was a SAN. But I never imagined Oracle would start having a hardware play. (Or two).

Christo: They got tired of people not buying bandwidth, so they’re forcing people to buy it now. Smart.

To start off the conference, the first keynote at Oracle OpenWorld took a break from technology and veered into the world of politics. The official conference description says:

Washington’s best-loved political couple Mary Matalin and James Carville entertain the crowd with a bitingly humorous look at the world of politics.

Indeed, there was humor, and politics. For a light-hearted yet factual look at US politics, watch the video by streaming directly in your browser or download the 176 Mb Flash video file.

(more…)

Next week, Dan Norris and I will collaborate on a presentation at Oracle Openworld 2008. Our presentation, entitled So, You Want to be an Oracle ACE?, will be on Monday, 9/22, from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm in Moscone South, room 310 — that’s the very first conference slot.

We’ve already put together our presentation, with input from many Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE directors, complete with some great video clips. I’m excited and honored to be presenting with Dan. The official description of our presentation is:

The Oracle ACE program recognizes those who provide sustained community contributions, among other criteria. An Oracle ACE director, this session’s speaker emphasizes the value of community involvement and spends much time volunteering. It can be hard to know where and how to start. An intro to what community means (especially to Oracle) and specific volunteer activities may be all some people need to start. The session covers benefits of becoming involved in the community–so you can convince your manager to let you do so on company time.

We will also be presenting Tuesday afternoon as part of the unconference at 3 pm in Overlook I.

As I am a first-time Oracle Open World attendee, I’m a bit overwhelmed — there are over 1700 presentations! I’ll have my coworker, Alex Gorbachev as a guide, but if you see me, say hi — don’t let the speaker badge fool you, I will likely be pretty lost. :)

Note: This article is about the WHERE extension to SHOW. I specifically use SHOW STATUS as an example, but WHERE is an extension to many SHOW statements.

Often DBAs will assess the health of a system by looking at some of the status variables returned by SHOW GLOBAL STATUS (specifying GLOBAL is important; remember that SHOW STATUS is the same as SHOW SESSION STATUS).

There are many status variables that SHOW GLOBAL STATUS returns. (SHOW GLOBAL STATUS on a Windows machine, MySQL version 5.0.67 returned 249, 5.1.22 returned 256 and 6.0.6-alpha returned 295 status variables!). I have used the SHOW STATUS LIKE syntax to help give me the output I really want, particularly when I forget the exact names of the status variables I am looking for.

But I did not know of a way to perform SHOW STATUS NOT LIKE or have any other means of filtering the information. Until today, when I was reading up on SHOW STATUS.
(more…)

Smithy commented on my blog post about the rumor of Monty leaving Sun with a pointer to an article on ComputerWorld Finland that mentions:

Widenius told to Computerworld Finland on Friday that negotiations are still on.

Meanwhile, Matt Asay, who seems to think Monty actually has left Sun (even though all other reports have been clear to mention that this is unconfirmed), writes of a new investment Monty has made.

Last week I speculated about the impact of Monty leaving Sun. In the end, if he does stay, it’s wonderful for Sun. If he leaves, he will no doubt go on to continue to be wonderful for the database community at large, much like Jim Starkey.

But until Monty Says, nothing is official.

Scenario: Someone wants to know which of the over 50 MySQL users have certain privileges.

There are many ways to solve this problem. Some of these scenarios are tedious and repetitious, others take no time at all.

The issue, of course, lies in what the “certain” privileges are. If it is “who has the SUPER privilege?” then a simple

SELECT user,host FROM mysql.user WHERE Super_priv='Y';

is sufficient. If it is “who has write access to the foo database”, you might write:

SELECT user,host FROM db WHERE Db='foo' AND Select_priv='Y';

but that only shows who explicitly has read permissions on that database; it does not include those who have global read permissions. The full query would be:
(more…)

Last week Giuseppe Maxia announced the Call for Papers for the 2009 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, and also announced that there would be an unconference, MySQL Camp, organized by me.

It’s true! Currently MySQL Camp is set to happen, though I am still working out details with Colin Charles and Giuseppe Maxia. We had originally talked about having MySQL Camp on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I would like to add Monday so that folks attending the conference who are not attending a tutorial have a choice on Monday. I am also looking into lunch options, since the conference venue does not have many options within walking distance.

There will be plenty of collaborative effort, of course, which will appear later on. If you have input, you can always e-mail me, or leave a comment here. Whether there is a topic you really want to see, or some logistical detail you always see that’s missed, I would like to hear about it.

(yes, I said I wanted you to give me your opinions!)

Oracle RAC SIG web cast presented by your humble servant. Don’t miss it today! You can register on the RAC SIG web-site. This is a longer than usual session (90 minutes) packed with details of connection failover, load balancing and implementation details.

The session starts later than usual — 1pm PDT or 4pm EDT. However, I will have to wake up at 4am here in Sydney, Australia. Besides being way too early for me, it would be the first time I present in the form of a web cast. I’m somewhat worried that I won’t actually see the audience and there is no immediate feedback link but I guess I will have to assume that nobody is snoring. ;-)

That’s all folks. Can’t write too much rumblings here — I’m way too busy these days settling Down Under… settling down Down… eh, you know what I mean. See you on the web cast!

I have not said much about Drizzle here; that is because there is not much to say. It is premature, really, to say anything about it at this point. Some have said they will support Drizzle; as Pythian supports several database systems, it is very likely that we will support Drizzle as well. Particularly since there is in-house Drizzle expertise already. But I digress; my point is that it is premature to really say much about Drizzle.

My involvement in Drizzle goes back to around the end of April/beginning of May 2008. Given my early involvement, (more…)