Pythian Group

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.
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A short post to direct people’s attention to and solicit comments on the following from someone who is admittedly a hero of mine, Richard Stallman:

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.

“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticized the rash of cloud computing announcements as “fashion-driven” and “complete gibberish”.

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do,” he said. “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

That blockquote links to the article at the Guardian where Stallman is interviewed and quoted. Please follow it to read the article in its entirety.

What do you think?

Larry Ellison is announcing a major new feature this Wednesday at Open World. For the first time in a while, his keynote is dedicated to the “database” as opposed to the usual high level ERP/Apps/Fusion. Even the title of his keynote is catchy — “Extreme Performance”.

Oracle has been keeping the new feature a secret. Even the 11gR2 beta program had very few participants to prevent information leaking out. It’s, “Something’s coming, but I am not telling what.”

Okay, it worked on me, I’m excited about it. Let’s think what it could be. What single database feature is so major, that Larry himself will announce it during OpenWorld?

What do we know so far?

• Starting with the obvious, Larry’s keynote is “Extreme Performance”, so it’s related to performance.
• We know Kevin Closson has worked on it – he had a blog entry saying “I am working on something big” that got pulled off the web. (Here’s Google’s cache.)

Given these two point, let’s further think about it. What do we know about Kevin?

• He worked for PolyServe — a company whose main product is a cluster file system.
• He worked for Sequent on NUMA systems, which in today’s world is pretty close to cluster software with a very fast, low latency interconnect.
• He is an expert in storage systems and disk performance.
• He joined Oracle recently, possibly to work on this secret project.
• He must be really excited about it, to post anything on his blog under radio silence.

I think it’s something related to storage, something new and revolutionary about storage. But what?

We already know, from leaks on certain websites, that ASM will become a cluster filesystem which will allow storing OCR files, as well as user files, on the ASM disks.

But is this big enough? It’s definitely significant. Now you get a “free” reliable, cluster file system with Oracle. I don’t think it’s big enough though. Oracle already had OCFS and OCFS2. So it’s not something new to release a filesystem. And even if ASM becomes a true filesystem, that would not provide such a significant performance boost to warrant a keynote called “Extreme Performance”. An ASM filesystem would be a major manageability feature, not so much a performance feature.

That being ruled out, what could it be?

Recently, when setting up a new 11g database on a server with 128gb of RAM, I was setting up hugepages as usual, and thinking about how big my cache would be. It struck me that the cache will be bigger than the database for quite a while. Why do we even need the SAN/Datafiles?!

Then it hit me.

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