Posted by Marc Fielding on Sep 21, 2011
Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is in many ways similar to an Exadata quarter rack: they both use two similar compute servers in an engineered system configuration, with shared storage and flash storage. But in other ways, especially networking and storage, they differ significantly. In particular:
- Storage connectivity: ODA uses SAS direct attachment, while Exadata uses an InfiniBand backbone connected to dedicated storage servers
- Flash memory: Exadata has significantly more flash memory than ODA does. While both can store ASM diskgroups in flash, Exadata also has flash cache capability. ODA’s default configuration uses flash to store redo logs; this helps compensate for ODA’s lack of
battery-backed disk write cache in the latency-sensitive redo write workload.
- Expandability: ODA currently comes in a single 2-server, 12TB configuration. An Exadata quarter-rack configuration has
2 compute servers and a minimum of 21TB raw storage. Both compute capacity and storage are expandable virtually without limit, given sufficient number of racks and network backbone.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Sep 21, 2011
I’ve started putting together some information about the Oracle Database Appliance in question-and-answer form. If you have an unanswered question, ask away in the comment section below.
(Update: Oracle has come out with their official FAQ as well)
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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jul 25, 2011
There has been quite a bit written about Oracle Mix Voting (let me refer to it as OMV for short) this year and I don’t think I should waste your time restating any of this. What I wanted to do is to take a step back and try to list “stakeholders” of OMV.
Before I continue, here is some of the relevant blog posts on this topic:
Oracle Mix: OOW11 voting, a race against time – Australia speaks up through votes
Data Science Fun with the OOW Mix Session Voting Data
Has Oracle MIX “Suggest-A-Session” Jumped the Shark???
Suggest-a-Session 2011 follow-up: What worked, what didn’t, and how can we improve?
Let’s see who the imaginable stakeholders are and what their primary needs are from the Oracle Mix Suggest-A-Session project. I hope I don’t sound too cynical but I think it’s a reasonable objective…
1. Oracle Corp
Primary need — attract as much attention as possible to OOW, positive media splash around OOW.
Was it successful? Of course, twittersphere and blogosphere were boiling around OMV. You could argue that there were some other needs but for the company as business — marketing was number one reason to support OMV, IMHO.
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Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Oct 1, 2010
Welcome to Log Buffer. The weekly roundup of posts, and news of what’s happening in the database world.
At Pythian, we’re pretty much recovered from a hectic Oracle OpenWorld 2010, and I’m no longer an OOW virgin. What an experience! I had the pleasure of meeting many of you Log Buffer readers and contributors at the Annual Blogger’s Meetup at Jillian’s. Great to put faces to names. And I now officially feel like “Vanessa from Log Buffer”, as many of your t-shirts will show.
Many thanks to Marc Fielding for providing the hot items for this week’s post, in Log Buffer #203. Enjoy.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Sep 28, 2010
It looks like our lucky recipients of plane rides with Sean D. Tucker had a great time. Pictures are below. Thanks again to Team Oracle for facilitating the flights.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Sep 21, 2010
Congratulations to Chris Marlowe of Oppenheimer Funds and Bill Mitchell of Alliant Energy, attendees to my Exadata session yesterday. Both are lucky winners of the a flight with the inimitable Sean D Tucker and the Oracle Challenger.
For those of you who missed the session, keep your eyes on this blog for a recording, coming soon.
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Posted by Vanessa Simmons on Sep 19, 2010
Oracle Recognizes Pythian as a Value-Added Partner for Core Database Expertise and Outstanding Consulting Services
PYTHIAN NEWS: As Announced today at Oracle OpenWorld 2010, San Francisco, CA.
Contact Vanessa Simmons for media inquiries.
The Pythian Group, Inc., a leading provider of remote database infrastructure services, and a Platinum member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced it has achieved four specializations under the OPN Specialized Program. By attaining “specialized status” Pythian has demonstrated and met rigorous business and technical competency criteria for core Oracle solutions including Oracle Database 11g, Database Performance Tuning, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), and Oracle Linux. Through specialization Pythian demonstrates solid experience, expertise and success with planning, deploying and managing Oracle products in complex and large-scale environments, providing added value to Oracle end-customers.
Pythian has been an Oracle partner since 1999, providing services across the entire Oracle technology stack since the company’s inception. Pythian consulted on the implementation of Oracle Exadata at LinkShare Corporation, the first in New York. The company’s DBA and senior consulting resources serve over 140 clients worldwide, including FOXSports Interactive, and have been engaged in many Oracle-related projects. In addition; Pythian is the outsourced database services team for Grasshopper, known as the virtual phone system for entrepreneurs.
“We have worked with Pythian for a number of years at FOXSports Interactive and view this specialization as a further commitment to the Oracle expertise they provide,” said Sheli Reynolds, Vice President, Engineering.
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Posted by Paul Vallee on Sep 19, 2010
Live from Larry:
Exalogic elastic cloud
1 “box” has
30 servers 2-socket x 6-core
Infiniband networking
HA integrated storage appliance
Linux or Solaris
Single patch for all components
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Sep 18, 2010
The 5 hour flight to San Francisco for OpenWorld is a good chance to catch up on some blogging I’ve been meaning to do. Now if only Air Canada would get some in-flight Internet (they ran a trial last year an shut it down without comment in April)
With the release of the 11.2.0.2 patchset, Oracle has stopped releasing sets of individual patches, but instead is packaging it as a self-contained, complete software install. I can see many benefits to this method, and quite frankly am wondering why it took so long to come about:
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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Sep 14, 2010
Counting down. The details are finally organized — this year, we have not one, but TWO great prizes at the Oracle OpenWorld Bloggers Meetup.
1) T-shirt art contest on stylish Pythian designer t-shirts — one lucky blogger will receive an HP X310 Data Vault, generously sponsored again this year by HP.
2) For the best, most creative blog post about the meetup itself, Pythian is giving away an Apple TV. But, there are a few small rules:
- the blog post must use as many names of people in attendance as possible.
- the blog post must be readable. It needs to make sense to someone who wasn’t there. It must be a story and not a list.
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