Pythian Group

It’s Sunday morning early in San Francisco and the biggest ever Oracle OpenWorld is about to start. It looks like it’s also going to be the busiest ever OpenWorld for me — my schedule looks crazy and I still need to do the slides for my Thursday sessions (one on ASM and one on cloud computing). Fortunately, my slides for today’s presentation are all ready to go.

OK. Don’t let me carry away — I started this post with the intention to write about what I expect Oracle to announce at this OpenWorld and it seems like the most important announcements happen at tonight’s keynote. I hasn’t been at the Oracle ACE Directors briefing so unlike them, all I can say is pure speculation-based and my wishes of what should be covered. Actually, unlike them, I actually CAN say at least something. :)

1. Oracle Exadata Database Machine v3 (x2-8) — well, that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody by now. I fully expect upgrade of the hardware — new Intel CPUs (probably with more cores), more memory, possibly more flash (this technology moves really quick these days). Maybe 10GbE network can be introduced to address some of the customers demands but I don’t think it’s needed that much. InfiniBand might just stay as it is — I think there is enough throughput but Marc Fielding noted that moving InfiniBand to the next speed level shouldn’t be very expensive. Other then cosmetic upgrade, I believe that hardware architecture will largely stay the same — it works very well, it’s proven and very successful. Maybe something should be done to let customers integrate Exadata better into their data-centers — folks keep complaining of inflexibility (and I think Oracle should stay firm on this and don’t let customer screw themselves up but who knows).
   On the software side, Read the rest of this entry . . .

In line with my prediction from few days ago, Larry Ellison is announcing the new Database Machine — the new version is targeting OLTP workloads and is based on Sun hardware.

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.
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Update 9-Jul-10 Pythian has now announced our range of Oracle Exadata Services, along with successful implementations and reference customers.

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.

Moving on to predictions and speculations…
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