Posted by Marc Fielding on Jul 27, 2010
After covering hardware components of Sun Oracle Database Machine in part 1, our grand tour continues with a look at the software side. With the prominent exceptions of the Exadata storage server software and the Oracle database itself, the software stack is based on well-known and widely used open source products.
Database Nodes
The database nodes all run Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3, a virtual clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, but also including some small performance-related kernel tweaks. Version 11.2.1.3.1 of the Oracle Exadata Storage Server software contains an update to version 5.5.
The hardware drivers, notably the OpenFabrics InfiniBand implementation, are GPL-licensed open source. Stacked on top of the infiniband are the Reliable Datagram Socket (RDS) protocol and the proprietary Oracle iDB. This is what Kevin Closson said about it in his interview on our blog:
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Marc Fielding on Jul 6, 2010
Pythian has full-featured Oracle Exadata Services complete with successful implementations and reference customers.
When Oracle first introduced Exadata at OpenWorld 2008, it was aimed squarely at the data warehouse market dominated by Teradata, Netezza, and other pure-play vendors. Version 2, introduced a year later, has expanded the scope to include general-purpose mixed and even pure transaction processing workloads. Marketing claims abound with reports of 10x and faster speed improvements.
In this series of articles (part 2 here and part 3 here), we’ll explore the major components of Exadata and the Oracle Database Machine and take a peek at how they’re designed with performance and scalability in mind.
Going against the industry trend of embedding database-specific logic in hardware, Exadata makes use of commodity off-the-shelf hardware components, with an underlying open source operating system stack. While arguably such a common hardware architecture makes it easier for competitors to copy functionality, it also gives Exadata a well-understood, stable, and tested platform that’s constantly evolving higher speeds and capacities.
Database nodes
The database nodes in an Oracle Database Machine will be familiar to anyone who has worked with Oracle RAC in a Linux/x86 platform. They consist of exactly the same Sun Fire x4170 1U servers sold for general-purpose computing, but come maxed out in terms of configuration: Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Sep 17, 2009
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.
Where Standard Edition seems to fit nicely is Read the rest of this entry . . .
