Comments on: Larry Ellison to Announce OLTP Database Machine on… Sun Hardware

By: suckit

suckit — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:08:15 +0000

The pictures speak for themselves. :)

http://suckit.blog.hu/2009/09/15/ott_lesz_vajon_lorinc

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:04:21 +0000

@Peter: I personally would still think it’s on Linux and maybe SPARC coming. On the other hand, there is good correlation with what Oracle is preparing for OOW announcement and Larry’s commitment to SPARC platform. Also, interesting rumors regarding new Exadata to be based on Sun’s new 1U storage unit with T2000+ CPU’s.

By: Peter Newham

Peter Newham — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:14:27 +0000

What makes you think Oracle will do this on SPARC architecture rtaher than Lin-tel ?

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:23:01 +0000

@E.M.MYLONAS: Well, life is life. I don’t see how the whole software industry will suffer if Oracle fails — many vendors will like it. :) Whether it’s good for us as customers — that’s a tough call.

By: E.M.MYLONAS

E.M.MYLONAS — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:59:33 +0000

…what is stated about SUN, is -fortunately- half the story.
Unfortunately, SUN did not make money on a great number of innovations, arguably the highest being the JAVA platform, but, it did train a market of small business, to meet the next age of computing. Besides several marketing mistakes SUN suffered on other sectors, fairness must acknowledge, that the fate of pioneers and social benefactors -as has been the case of several others we forget, does still not aling well with business; hopefully a predicament that has to be addressed better in the immediate future.

Let the social message be properly understood, that it is now realized how difficult is to combine a brilliand performance of innovation, and yet also maintain a swift commercial agility. Our system is not designed for such strategies -and yet, this is the one we dearly need in the 21st century.
Complexity -or the exterminator of good will if you prefer- has swiftly brought into their knees many nobble endeavors, and this is -unfortunately- another crucial example.

The certain issue for ORACLE to realize now, is that failing to capitalize on the legacy of SUN and expectations from the public domain of expertise raised by SUN, will bring an avalance of bad news for the S/W industry, with a stake held for ORACLE as well.

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:11:57 +0000

Thanks all for the comments.

@Mathew: thanks for the link. Will update the post. Re performance – I think we are all wondering if promised TPC-C benchmark is going to be on the new OLTP Database Machine. It must be the best way to enter this market.

@Mark: Yes indeed. ASM doesn’t have anything close to it but that’s the flagship Oracle solution for shared storage. It’s a good possibility that Exadata Storage Servers v2 would use ZFS as volume manager and then RAC database servers access it via ASM. At least that would totally make sense for FLASH disks.

@Martin: you might be right regarding the flash cache. I would think, however, that it’s something that comes from ZFS and Sun Open Storage. It usually takes longer to plan and introduce such a significant feature in Oracle database so Oracle must have been working on this for a while.

By: Martin Berger

Martin Berger — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:40:50 +0000

As this thing is called FlashFire, let’s see how this matches with Oracles Flash Cache.
In this combination, I don’t think the development of Flash Cache is pure coincidence.
As a SUN-user, I hope the whole setup os more ‘open’ as Exadata is today.
Martin.

By: Mark Callaghan

Mark Callaghan — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:43:32 +0000

ZFS on Flash sounds interesting. Copy-on-write as done by ZFS might cause too much fragmentation leading to too much random IO. But random IO isn’t a problem for ZFS on Flash.

By: Mathew Butler

Mathew Butler — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:01:49 +0000

I’m still expecting Exadata news. I think Oracle may have some exciting performance benchmark results in their back pocket!

Your links doesn’t work for me. Here’s one that does – http://bit.ly/fSFfh

Mat.