Pythian Group

Update, July 9, 2010: Pythian has now announced our range of services for Oracle Exadata, along with successful implementations and reference customers.

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 . . .

Last Friday (September 26), Paul Vallée and I were lucky enough to interview Kevin Closson about the Oracle Exadata Storage Server. A tidied-up stream of the audio is here: closson-interview.m3u.

The audio quality is a little spotty here and there, so you might like to follow the transcription below.

Paul gets the interview started.

Paul Vallée (PV): Christo Kutrovsky and myself, Paul Vallée. We’re on the line with Kevin Closson of Oracle (and prior to that with Hewlett-Packard, and prior to that with Polyserve, and prior to that with Sequent). A giant of our industry, and I’m honoured to be speaking to him. Kevin, hello.

Kevin Closson (KC): Well, they always say that flattery gets you nowhere, but apparently it’ll get you on the phone.

PV: [laughs] Very nice!

KC: No seriously, it’s more than a pleasure to be here. I like what you guys do, so this is good.

PV: Thank you, Kevin. So, we are here to talk about the work that Larry Ellison announced yesterday, specifically the work around the Oracle Database Machine and the Exadata Storage Server. Kevin, can you just quickly introduce yourself and how you came to be involved in the project?

KC: Right. So, I’m a performance architect with Oracle, and the project that I’m stationed on, if you will, is the development team for Oracle Exadata Storage Server. And the way I came to Oracle is, quite a few of the folks who are involved with the very genesis of Exadata are people that I’ve known and worked with closely dating back to the early ’90s. And after a fruitful endeavour as the chief software architect for Oracle solutions at Polyserve, it became an opportunity to latch onto Oracle, because we sold our company to them. So there we are.

PV: How exciting! Congratulations! So I noticed that there’s still a little, I guess a diversion in terms of the branding. Larry definitely introduced it as the Exadata Programmable Storage Server, and I double-checked the video. But in your blog, you’re calling it, for sure, just the Exadata Storage Server. Just how recently was the marketing/messaging developed for this?

KC: You know, I’m not a part of the Go-To-Market (GTM) efforts, but, you know, honestly, the way these things are brought to market . . .  They’re developed under a project name, and the project name remains the same for years. It was over the last few months that Marketing began cooking the name and what-have-you. Now, if you’re referring to something that Larry said in his keynotes, I have to admit I didn’t commit to photographic memory all the slides. And certainly, if he used the term “programmable”, I’m not going to correct Larry Ellison.

PV: [laughs] That would be risky.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Notice to readers:
This is an excerpt of my liveblogging of the Keynote where the Oracle Database Machine was announced.

It is a mix of my comments in real time, and my quotes from things Larry Ellison said that I felt were worthy of mention.

You may be interested in reading more about Oracle’s Exadata platform. I would suggest taking a gander at Oracle’s product page and also reading up on Christo Kutrovsky’s Analysis of the Exadata and Oracle Database Machine announcement from a different point of view.

Also, Alex Gorbachev posted his analysis of the Oracle Database Machine and that’s a worthy read with some new technical details.

You may also be interested in the complete liveblog transcript of the keynote which includes my liveblogging of the rather boring HP advertiseynote before the big show.

I also separated out the Oracle Exadata Storage Server liveblog if you just want to get to the rest of the juicy stuff.

On with the liveblogging!

Second product announcement: The Oracle Database Machine (in partnership with HP).

Specs slides.

8 64-bit servers, 14 exadata storage servers, tons of ram.

Larry: “It will hold really a lot of songs”.

Three year development program.
Custormers:
Amazon, Yahoo, Countrywide, NPD, Quelle

M-Tel: a Bulgarian company, 10-72 times speedup. The worst speedup was 10x.

Alex G: “It’s mainframes!”

Larry: “Next slide”. Martin W: “why doesn’t he have the clicker himself!?”

Christo (a bulgarian) “I can’t believe M-Tel had this and managed to keep it a secret. That’s funny.”

28x P-Series competitive advantage at M-Tel. For half of one.

Darrin L: “Yeah but what’s the price difference. How do you license this!?”

Good questions IMHO. Oracle licenses based on server performance. There is a major problem to be solved there.

TPC-H query set. 30x average speed-up.

They have a paper describing it. Will be intersting to read it.

Christo: “This seems to be parallel-query only! It might be only for data warehouses!”

Larry: “With a conventional array, when you add storage, you don’t add data bandwidth. With this solution, every time you add storage server, you are adding not just disk capacity, but two infiniband pipes, two processors, and more cache”.

Makes Sense. Refer to BAHD again. Man I feel a bit smart right now.

Now bashing Teradata. I guess we’re into the advertising section.

Now Larry is saying how similar this is to Netezza. One processor per disk drive. Christo is saying it’s very similar.

Larry: two big differences:
1. our database machine runs oracle, theirs does not.
2. we lose a drive, ours keeps running, theirs does, their queries stop.
Christo “umm no they don’t they have three way mirroring”.

Great quip: “even I studied about B-Tree indexes in School!” LOL LOL

Slide – comparing vs. Netezza. Clearly this is the company they are targeting.
Oracle’s stuff is bigger and faster and has more cores and faster bandwidth.

Christo: “The question is, does that CPU sort.”

HP Oracle … 650,000 vs. 1.500,000 for Teradata system with less spec.

In the Oracle column, you need to pay the 1.7 mm software license.

Software license for Oracle though… 1.7mm. There is something interesting going on here.

“Even if you pay list for Teradata, it’s cheaper for capacity.”

Next slide……..

Will speed up OLTP as well as data warehousing.

Available today, 10-50x faster than current (in small type) oracle data warehouses”

I must have missed something. How is this not costing more than Teradata?

OK Christo explained, the Oracle system had triple the storage for modestly more cost.

Mark Hurd talking again. Can HP please hire somebody exciting? Maybe exciting is just not what they do.

Adds the fact that these storage servers are “completely open, proliant-based servers”.

I wonder how long this will be HP-only.

Next, I think you’ve listened to me for long enough, now take a moment and listen to this advertising interlude.

More to come.

Update, July 9, 2010: Pythian has now announced our range of services for Oracle Exadata, along with successful implementations and reference customers.

Notice to readers:
This is an excerpt of my liveblogging of the Keynote where the Exadata Storage Server was announced.

It is a mix of my comments in real time, and my quotes from things Larry Ellison said that I felt were worthy of mention.

You may be interested in reading more about Oracle’s Exadata platform. I would suggest taking a gander at Oracle’s product page and also reading up on Christo Kutrovsky’s Analysis of the Exadata and Oracle Database Machine announcement from a different point of view.

You may also be interested in the complete liveblog transcript of the keynote which includes my liveblogging of the rather boring HP advertiseynote before the big show.

I also separated out the Oracle Database Machine liveblog if you just want to get to the rest of the juicy stuff.

So here goes with the liveblogging transcript:

Announcing Oracle’s first ever hardware product.

The exadata programmable storage server.

Building intelligence into the storage server.

Allows us to reduce the amount of data.

Confirming HP is the partner.

Storage server does not pass disk blocks back to the database server, it actually passes query results.

Note: A few startups are doing this sort of thing already. They should be totally freaking out right now.

Slide explaining how query processing works in traditional storage.

Stark contrast to a grid of exadata storage servers, with processing ability local to each and every disk drive.

“We actually pass the query from the database server directly into the storage servers.”

Explaining how this works.

This reminds me hugely of kickfire for mysql, but for Oracle.

Cool, they’re provisioning two infiniband pipes per storage server. Nice. 40gbps.

Marc Fielding: “The problem is still the disk drives.”

Larry: 1gb/s per exadata storage server, you can have dozens working in parallel.

Christo: 1gb/s??? that’s not that good.

Immediately available for Linux., will work with any Oracle database.
Available for x86. Christo: “not 64 bit???????”

By the way, I made a bet with Paul Cunningham that Kickfire would fail because of Moore’s law. I wonder if I should bet against this tech too.

More details to come…

Learn more about Pythian’s services for evaluation, migration to and operational support for Oracle Exadata.

This is the 114^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

I am sorry to say that this log buffer was supposed to be edited by Dave Edwards, but he’s suffering from severe and long-lasting tooth pain and until his root canal is done he’s KO’d by a killer combo of painkillers and the pain that the painkillers can’t kill. I’ve been there myself, twice, and here’s a tip Dave. It hurts until the dentist takes out the needle. Then the pain goes away while he digs. The pain comes back that night. The next morning it’s worse than ever, unbelievably, writhingly bad. But later that afternoon, blisssssssssssss. :-) Good luck man.

This Log Buffer has been generated in a completely automated way with the help of the incredibly awesome AideRSS.

To give you an idea of just how awesome it is, I was able to load up Dave’s complete OPML file of all the blogs he monitors for Log Buffer. And AideRSS applied it’s magical PostRank algorithm which scores blog posts based on how many comments, del.icio.us bookmarks, blog links from other blogs, etc. that it received, along with some more secret sauce they don’t publicly tell us about (kind of like Google with their Pagerank equivalent). The number to the left of each headline represents the linked item’s AideRSS PostRank.

It did a great job of automatically selecting the best posts from the last week.

To give you an idea of AideRSS’s helpfulness, here are a couple useful feeds I suggest you subscribe to:

1. PlanetMySQL, but only with posts that rank “Best”
2. OraNA.info, again only the posts that rank “Best”. Note that there is a bug in Eddie’s feed that makes it impossible to use all possible information on the ranking.
3. SQLBlogs.com processed by AideRSS to show only the best posts.

While I have no idea how AideRSS plans to make moolah, I think we can agree that is some kind of awesome if you’re like me and can’t afford to miss a big story, but can’t afford the time you would need to read it all. Many thanks to Andrew Baldwin and although that’s the AideRSS about page there there’s a good pic of Andrew on that page. I first met Andrew at MySQLConf 2008 this spring and he’s a great guy and a great advocate for this service.

10.0 – Random selection, with a bias ..

Read the rest of this entry . . .