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 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 15, 2009
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.
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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Sep 13, 2009
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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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Sep 10, 2009
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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Posted by Paul Vallee on Apr 22, 2009
Curt Monash of DBMS2, the database industry analysis and research blog, posted a flurry of Oracle/Sun/MySQL commentaries since the announcement, and upon learning that they no longer appear on PlanetMySQL I thought I would quickly draw the community’s attention to the thoughts of one of our industry’s most respected thinkers on the deal.
It is worth it to read them all. Here they are in reverse order of publication (meaning newest first):
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Apr 21, 2009
I enjoyed InSync09 conference and the networking opportunities there — great place to meet bunch of good old friends and make some new ones. The content of the presentations and direction where Oracle is going to provided some interesting food for thoughts on Oracle’s strategy and how it’s going to make money with all those acquisitions they’ve done recently including current Oracle-Sun deal.
My take now is that Oracle’s focus is integration of all those products. It’s absolutely clear that Oracle won’t be able to merge so many different product lines together. It’s difficult and time consuming task and customers often suffer during this transition process. Oracle does not want its customer suffer — it’s the best way to shrink their customer base.
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Posted by Paul Vallee on Apr 21, 2009
I am very excited to be able to link to this press release announcing that The Pythian Group is the founding partner in MySQL’s brand-new “Remote DBA Provider” partnership program. This is great news for Pythian. It is also good news for Sun/MySQL. (Although admittedly nowhere near as attention-getting as Oracle’s announcement of their purchase of Sun Microsystems. Note that Pythian has been an Oracle partner for a very long time already.)
What this means is that MySQL Platinum Enterprise Support for MySQL is now bundled with every Pythian support contract. As a partner at the Platinum-level—the highest-tier support for MySQL—Pythian receives the level of support that most closely meshes with the elite and ultra-responsive level of enterprise infrastructure management that has been our tradition for over ten years.
This will now allow us to provide our customers cohesive and collaborative services of the highest calibre in full co-operation with the brilliant engineers at MySQL. (Something to note—there is currently no other way to get MySQL Platinum Enterprise Support on a monthly-pay basis other than through Pythian; otherwise it is an annual subscription.)
When the matter is related to database management, operations and administration, consulting, architecture, server consolidation, cloud offload, clustering, or sharding, Pythian engineers will take the lead in consultation with MySQL. When the matter is product functionality, emergency or routine product support, enhancement requests, patches, and so forth, MySQL will take the lead as coordinated by Pythian, so that the client always has Pythian fully-informed and in control of the optimal delivery of support.
This partnership represents months of work by Pythian’s Peter Ling in collaboration with Anna Weihl at Sun, with Andrew Waitman’s and my support together with that of Sun’s Kevin Schmidt, Jeff Wiss, and Karen Tegan Padir.
I also want to thank Marten Mickos for his early advocacy surrounding this strategy. Marten, although you have left Sun, you should be happy to know that the community spirit you led with from the top has caught on and not flagged since your departure.
Posted by Gerry Narvaja on Apr 20, 2009
If you review the recent years of Oracle’s history, you’ll see that its purchase of Sun makes perfect sense. Oracle has tried to get in the OS business (Oracle Ubreakable Linux), the hardware business with their different partnerships (e.g.: Hewlett Packard Partner Relationship), and even into the MySQL business back when they bought InnoBase (Oracle and Innobase).
MySQL was in many ways a leader for the Open Source industry, both in the way the way it marketed OSS and in the way MySQL the company was built. It’s the latter aspect that worries me. MySQL was a world pioneer in having a global workforce and this shaped both its culture and products.
When I joined MySQL in 2001, 90% of the company was distributed outside their native Swedish offices. (When Sun bought it, it was down to 80% outside the Cupertino headquarters, which I’m sure is still more than any large or middle-size corporation can claim.) This meant that they hired the best talent they could find wherever they found it, and that they could follow the talent wherever it went. During my years at MySQL, many people moved around from country to country without affecting their jobs. This diversity and flexibility shaped everything the company did, and indeed, the different backgrounds of those involved greatly influenced the characteristics of MySQL AB’s products and services themselves.
Sun was already deep into distributing its workforce when they acquired MySQL, so of all the big corporations, it was probably the one that best fit MySQL’s culture. Oracle, however, is a very different story, and I’m not sure how the distributed workforce that the Sun and MySQL employees are used to, will fit into the new organization. This change will affect MySQL’s future—I’m not sure how, but it will be very different from the MySQL we know.
(On a side note, although I don’t think Oracle is buying Sun because of MySQL, it looks like the Twitter community thinks so: both #oracle and #mysql are on the top 10 topics right now. Check both Twitter feeds, if nothing else, they’re fun.)
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Apr 20, 2009
It’s true — http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/technology/companies/21sun.html?_r=1&hp.
Ronald Bradford asked, “What does this mean for MySQL?”
Lots of people are going to be proclaiming that it is the death of MySQL, as they did when Oracle bought InnoDB.
But it is not. MySQL and Oracle may both be databases, but they are not competitors. To say they are competitors is like saying that an upscale bar and the corner convenience store are competitors because you can get soft drinks, coffee and tea at both. There are many applications for which Oracle is the appropriate solution, and there’s no reason to even try to see if MySQL can do the same job. Similarly there are many applications for which MySQL is the clearly appropriate solution and there’s no need to even consider Oracle.
So, in the end, what this acquisition means to me is that Sun’s going to get a little more of a boost — stock prices had been sinking for a while now, and Oracle will get some good hardware, which seems to be their latest foray.
EDIT (4/20/2009 10:09 pm PDT) — Just adding another reason I believe Oracle won’t kill MySQL — they make a ton of $$ off InnoDB hot backup…
