Pythian Group

This release is just a quick bug fix release of an older 1.1.1 version of the plug-in. It’s long overdue but I’ve managed to fix “” problem only couple weeks ago. I’ve distributed the new version to the folks who have reached out to me by email of via blog reporting the issue in the past few months and they all confirmed that the new version is working fine so I’m releasing it now.
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This blog post covers day 0 of UKOUG 2011 — Sunday, 4th of December, 2011.

Since there were so many of us from Pythian at the conference, I’m adding my name in the blog post title. I think I will be doing it for all conference posts as I think I’ve been doing for some time. This year, there were ten Pythian folks attending UKOUG Conference and we did twelve sessions including multiple presentations, masterclass, RAC Attack workshop, round-table and 10 minutes OakTalk. I think it’s the record number of session Pythian folks did at a single UKOUG conference and the record number of Pythian peeps attending. A dozen of Pythian people in Europe and now even a sales guy in the UK mean that Pythian penetration in the UK database services business is close to the infliction point. This is ultimately a good news!

Most of Canadian Pythian representatives arrived on Sunday morning to London Heathrow. The flight was quite empty so some of us managed to get a good nap in comfort of three empty seats. Since AirCanada has power outlets in most long haul flights, I was planning to work on my slides all the way in as I usually do. However, this time I was sitting next to Christo and he kept me involved in the conversation and at some point I was getting sleepy and finally took a nap as well so I’ve done literally nothing on my slides. Oh well, at least I had some rest and it was good because I was up for almost 20 hours after we landed except a quick nap in the car from London Heathrow to Birmingham. By the way, if you travel two or more from Heathrow, hiring car transfer service makes more financial sense than train or coach and is also quite convenient.
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My good friend (and personal hero) Cary Millsap is doing a series of one day classes around the world — Mastering Oracle Trace Data. One of them is conveniently scheduled in Birmingham Thursday next week right after the UKOUG Conference.
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While Oracle OpenWorld is still hot in our memories, I’m going to be presenting two of my OOW11 sessions at the Toronto Oracle User Group’s DD Day 2011 on 28-Oct-2011 — in just a bit over 2 weeks. Last time I presented for TOUG at their summer meeting in 2008 which makes it a tad over 3 years ago. It was a good fun and I’m looking forward to see many of you there again.

By the way, I think it’s quite a deal at $140 for non-members and $90 for TOUG members for a one day conference like that, especially if you are interested in the topics presented.

I have two sessions to present:
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Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA) is being announced at the Oracle OpenWorld keynote as I’m posting this. It will take some time for it to be actually available for shipment and some details will likely change but here is what we have so far about Oracle Big Data Appliance.

A rack with InfiniBand, full of 2U servers similar to Exadata Storage. No flash storage needed so couple sockets and a dozen of disks will do. Maybe more ram than Exadata storage cells themselves. I suspect you could have as many servers as you want in a configuration but since Hadoop clusters are usually dozens and more nodes, full rack seems reasonable with about 20 Hadoop compute nodes to start with. Real deployments should easily go into multiple racks stacked together.

Low latency, high bandwidth communication is critical for fast data loading and later data processing with Hadoop so InfiniBand will be there — same Exadata/Exalogic-like platform.

Oracle should also have its own NoSQL engine — Oracle NoSQL Database. If you know existing Oracle products, Berkley DB seems to be a reasonable foundation to power Oracle’s new NoSQL engine.
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News from Oracle OpenWorld flor…

What is Exalytics?

It’s a BI appliance machine — it’s like an application middle tier for complete Business Intellegence data warehousing solutions. You put it in front of Exadata and users get all the tools to work with that data – analyze, predict, run reports and etc.

Exalytics is a server having Oracle BI Suite, OBIEE, side by side with Essbase. OBI works with relational data warehouse like Exadata.

Exalytics features Essbase that can pull the data from Exadata and use its in-memory analytical capabilities to give users richer functionality. This is something which SAP HANA seems to target as well. Real-time analytics.

I’m still not sure how TimesTen fits here but we will learn soon.

It’s one server with 1TB DRAM and four 10 core Xeon CPUs. Of course InfiniBand to connect to Exadata back-end.

My note from the LJE comments – go easy with in-memory data compression – it’s expensive to decompress it each time.

I’m interested to see how Exalytics handles unstructured data analysis.

Today I want to show what kind of IO performance we can get from Oracle Database Appliance (ODA). In this part, I will focus on hard disks. That’s right — those good old brown spinning disks.

I often use Oracle ORION tool to stress-test an IO subsystem and find it’s limits. It’s a very simple and handy tool and usually provide most of the IO simulation I need.

I usually benchmark for small random IOs and for large sequential reads. This gives me a good idea what I can expect from this IO subsystem for OLTP workloads as well as bulk data processing workloads including data warehousing, backups and batch activity. I usually don’t stress test mixed workload until I know what’s the profile of the application that I will run on this platform. In this particular case, I’m more after generic IO stress test and finding the limit.

Today, let’s talk about small random IOs which is the attribute of the OLTP workloads. I’m interested in single IO response time and IOs per second (IOPS).

When I stress test an IO subsystem I usually process average numbers but I always remember that averages are just that — averages. Because my artificial ORION workload is pretty randomly distributed and I use reasonably small intervals, the results have good confidence for me but in some cases I would want to dig further and collect some histograms of IO latencies. I haven’t done it for Oracle Database Appliance though and knowing what’s behind I expect response time to be quite consistent – there is no disk cache or something similar that skews response time.

I should note that I use term IO response time and IO latency interchangeable here in case you are using these terms differently. It might be a bad habit but that’s what I do.

Before I stress test an IO subsystem, I usually set some expectations. Let’s do the same here. ODA has 20 disks – 15K RPM SAS disks. My experience tells me that I should expect very good single IO latency (below 10ms) from these disks serving at least 100 IOPS each. I also expect that these disks will still provide reasonable response time if you crank up the workload to about 200 IOPS but this is where I would see much higher response times — getting into 20ms range. Now, I know that 15K RPM SAS disk can deliver even more IOPS each but then IO response time becomes generally unacceptable for OLTP systems. In fact, 10 ms target is what’s been a good rule of thumb in the last decade.
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Many analysts are suggesting that a big data appliance will be announced at this OOW. Based on published Oracle OpenWorld focus sessions on oracle.com (PDF documents), the following technologies will most likely be the key — Hadoop, NoSQL, Hadoop data loader for Oracle, R Language.

Want more details — you have to wait for them. This page contained some details but they moved here.

Last Thursday I was invited to the panel organized by Ottawa Chapter of Canadian Women In Technology (CanWIT). I wanted to mention it here as CanWIT sets up very interesting events for women in IT so if you are interested in progressing your IT career, definitely consider their events.

The panel was designed to share the experience of few CIOs and CTOs — how they got into this job and how they developed their career, what the day of a CTO and CIO is like, what challenges they face in their jobs and how those challenges are approached. There were three panel speakers. Hana Pika is the CIO at University of Ottawa Heart Institute, established and rather traditionally-conservative organization when it comes to IT. Wayne MacLaurin is the CTO at Sedari, a startup providing domain registry services. Finally, myself with the official title of CTO but in reality having mixed responsibilities of CTO and CIO and Pythian not being a startup but still very nimble company.
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When I first heard about Oracle Database Appliance and what it does, I got really excited — I saw great potential in this product. When we got our hands dirty and started testing the appliance, I become confident that this product will be a hit. Now it’s finally the time when I can share my thoughts and experience along with other Pythian folks.

This article is targeted primarily on system architects and managers explaining what they get with Oracle Database Appliance as well as what they don’t get.

So what you do get with Oracle Database Appliance

This is why you would want the appliance — if some the bellow solves your headache.

Standard platform — highly repeatable solution

Oracle Database Appliance is the same hardware, same software up to the drivers, components firmware, hardware components revisions and etc — the same for all customers around the world. This means that you are very unlikely to encounter unique infrastructure issues. You will take advantage of all customers’ experience running Oracle Database Appliances in their data-centers. This is similarity to Exadata platform but Oracle Database Appliance has even less variations so more leverage from standards.
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