Pythian Group

This post has bee updated live from the Oracle OpenWorld as I’m learning what’s new. Last update done on 28-Sep-2010.

Oracle Exadata v2 has been transformed into x2-2 and x2-8. x2-2 is just slightly updated while x2-8 is a much more high-end platform. Please note that Exadata x2-2 is not just an old Exadata v2 — it’s a fully refreshed model. This is a huge confusion here at the OOW and even at the Oracle web site.

The new Exadata pricing list is released and Exadata x2-2 costs exactly the same as old Exadata v2. Exadata x2-8 Full Rack (that’s the only x2-8 configuration — see below why) is priced 50% higher then Full Rack x2-2. This is hardware price only to clarify the confusion (updated 18-Oct-2010).

Exadata Storage Server Software pricing is the same and licensing costs per storage server and per full rack is the same as for Exadata v2 because number of disks didn’t change. Note that storage cells got upgraded but priced the same when it comes to Exadata Server software and hardware. Nice touch but see implications on databases licensing below.

This comparison is for Full-Rack models Exadata x2-2 and x2-8 and existing v2 model.

Finally, data-sheets are available for both x2-2 (Thx Dan Norris for the pointers):

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/exadata/dbmachine-x2-2-datasheet-175280.pdf

and x2-8:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/exadata/dbmachine-x2-8-datasheet-173705.pdf

It means that live update of this post is probably over (27-Sep-2010).

Read the rest of this entry . . .

This post originated from a quick discussion we had internally on how to quickly and easily compare schemas between two Oracle databases. I learned about Sheeri Cabral’s post with a quick comparison solution for MySQL databases and I though of using a similar approach for Oracle. I did some testing and it worked quite well.

There certainly are tools in the market, free or not, that do this for us, and even generate scripts to correct differences. The steps below only go as far as to tell you what the differences are. However, they don’t require any additional tool and can be easily executed in any *nix or Windows environment.

The procedure uses the Oracle Data Pump utilities to extract one schema’s metadata and the Unix diff command to compare them. The metadata files generated by Data Pump, though, contain a lot of information about tables and indexes statistics that add too much noise to the diff output, since they usually differ a lot between databases. To eliminate that noise, I used the following small Perl script to pre-process the metadata files: Read the rest of this entry . . .