One of the customers (actually a prospect) here in Australia asked me about minimal Oracle licensing on a quarter rack database machine. This prompted a thought of using Oracle Standard Edition instead of full blown Enterprise Edition with bunch of options.
Before even going into possibility of using Oracle SE for the database machine, let’s see if we even want to.
Why Oracle Standard Edition?
If the environment is data warehouse then it’s extremely unlikely that Standard Edition will cut it. Lack of many feature make it non-feasible to use for data warehousing — no partitioning licensing, no parallel query, and dozens more.
Oracle Standard Edition might fit OLTP environments depending on the application design and data volumes. Since Database Machine is made to store large amounts of data, we assume that it makes financial sense to run databases that are quite large. Oracle SE lacks some critical features in order to successfully manage VLDB (Very Large Databases). It’s not impossible and depends a lot on the presence of outage windows, how active is the development life-cycle, availability requirements and etc.
Now that I, apparently successfully, predicted OLTP Database Machine on Sun hardware, I had to wake up before 6AM in Sydney to tune into Larry’s joined with Sun Microsystems webcast (just to learn that he is late, by the way – 8 minutes so far…). As the follow up post’s comments show, people are interested in the role of SPARC platform in the new OLTP Oracle Database Machine (turns our there is no role for SPARC as of now).
Waiting… Waiting… ah here it comes — yachts, BMW (yeah love it as well) and Larry walks in — he starts by mentioning lo-o-o-ong partnership with Sun and announced –
“Oracle Exadata version 2 – hardware by Sun and software by Oracle.” Funny, I heard exactly the same sitting at the Oracle Open World last year but with HP. He then proceeds — “It is the *First* Database Machine that does OLTP. All the other machines, Teradata, Netezza, etc. are designed just for data warehousing.”
Interesting that Larry’s speech was very harsh on competition and where it comes to data warehousing, it’s Netezza and Teradata, while in hardware it’s IBM. I need to count how many times Larry said “better/cheaper/faster than IBM” during his announcement. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Looks like I just got the date wrong. Oh well, now is the announcement, hype and demo is at the Oracle Open World and shipments are to start upon Oracle-Sun acquisition completion.
So what’s new in Exadata that I didn’t mention in the previous blog post? Ah, right — Sun FlashFire technology. It’s no surprise that the new OLTP version of Database Machine is boosting the IOPS (IO’s per second) capacity by introducing the flash drives. Nothing prevented Oracle to place flash disks into the original Exadata, not from technology perspective. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Update 16-Sep-09: Apparently, all this was true and you can find more details after the announcement that posted here.
OK. It’s not often that I make predictions these days but this was on my mind for a while so here we go. Mind you, I don’t have any confirmed insider information so it’s based on some assumptions, my perspective on Oracle-Sun acquisition and some vibes I can feel in the air.
The rumors are that Oracle Exadata v2 and Oracle Database Machine v2 are going to be announced within few weeks and my take is that it’s going to happen at the Oracle Open World. I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that it will be configured with Oracle Database 11g Release 2.
When: Friday, July 17, 2009 5:30 PM (please, make sure to RSVP yes/no/maybe)
Where:Sydney CBDJoin meetup for the detailed location.
The topic for this meetup is quite exciting – Oracle Exadata and everything about it. David Centellas, Senior Database Consultant from Oracle will do technical presentation on Exadata and, after the break, we will have a open forum discussion where two Oracle’s Enterprise Architects, Tim Rubin and Chris Jones, will answer our questions and share thir real-world experience.
Schedule:
5:30pm – 6:00pm — Networking with food and refreshments
6:00pm – 7:00pm — Presentation on Exadata by David Centellas
7:00pm – 7:30pm — Break and informal networking
7:30pm – 8:30pm — Open Forum based on real-world Exadata experience with David Centellas, Tim Rubin and Chris Jones
post even — optional gathering in the nearby pub – it’s Friday night in the end!
For those of you who didn’t see the Larry Ellison’s keynote here it is courtesy to Sheeri.
We cut out the HP part but I don’t think anyone will complain. It’s not the best angle but we didn’t get there early in advance to secure the right location for the camera.
*Updated* see comments.
Exadata — the smart storage server. I am definitely excited about this product, but my point of view is a bit different.
It’s fast, and much faster than anything out there right now. But how many shops will actually need this? How many shops can spend 2.2 million dollars on hardware and equipment?
What are the products, in a nutshell? The Oracle Exadata Storage Server (Data Sheet, PDF):
2U Storage “unit” with either 1 TB SAS or 3.3 TB SATA redundant capacity. There is a query processor in the box that can “offload” tasks from the main database server. Primary filtering, decompression, joins, backups.
Storage units linked to database servers via dual Infiniband offering 20 Gbit/s (2.5 GBytes/sec) bandwidth
A standard 42U rack with 8 database servers and 12 Exadata storage servers.
Pre-installed Linux and Oracle. Pre-configured.
In 8 servers — a total of 256GB RAM, 64 Intel cores @ 2.66 Ghz, InfiniBand-ed and gigabit-switched.
The cost for one Database Machine: $2.33M ($650,000 + $1,680,000 in software) as grabbed from Larry’s keynote (thank chet) I called the “call us now” phone mentioned on the Oracle Exadata website to ask them for pricing. They had no idea what I was asking about, and I’m still waiting on a salesperson to call me back. (Hint for Oracle — educate your sales staff about new products, just in case I decide to buy one the day after you announce it.)
You have to realize how “cheap” this is. It comes down to $25,000 per core for Oracle EE, RAC, and Partitioning! And extra “free” CPUs for decompressing, filtering and joining, and backups. That’s a good deal. Oh, did I mention you can interconnect several 42U racks?
Back to the main question, what problems does this product solve?
Here’s a cool video of Alex Gorbachev commenting on the Ellison announcements today to Oracle corporate communications, just moments after the end of the keynote:
