Oracle invests in its vision of social networks

Oracle's unexpected move into the hardware business, with the launch of storage and database products, has intrigued industry observers, writes Karlin Lillington in San Francisco

SOCIAL NETWORKING and a venture into hardware were the newcomers to Oracle's ever-increasing products universe last week at the company's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Most surprising was Oracle's unexpected move into the hardware business with the launch of two products, a storage server called Exadata, and a new ultra high speed "database machine".

Both are produced in conjunction with HP, whose chief executive Mark Hurd appeared onstage with Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison by video link to promote the joint venture.

Ellison said during his keynote address that the Exadata storage server would offer better performance speeds than traditional storage servers because it sifts data before transferring it over to a database server.

Ellison also launched the Oracle Database Machine - a grid, or multiple computer package of Exadata and database servers contained in a large rack - which he said was "the world's fastest database machine".

The two products bring the software company directly into the data warehousing market, and places Oracle in competition with hardware makers such as Sun Microsystems, EMC and IBM.

Some analysts felt the products would address a gap in the market for hardware that can more efficiently run database software. But others felt Oracle was coming late to a market full of formidable competition from some of the most powerful hardware companies.

On the application front, the company's major launch was Beehive, a collaboration software suite that utilises and manages many of the trendier social networking ("Web 2.0") technologies, such as wikis, forums, and online messaging.

Beehive, which incorporates some of Oracle's earlier collaboration products, was either new window-dressing for so-so products from Oracle's past, or a total overhaul that will bring Web 2.0 into the corporate world, depending on who one listened to.

"One of the things that we heard back from our customers was that, while all these [Web 2.0 technologies] exist, there's no integration for those products," said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice-president of Oracle server technologies. "Integration is one of the things we thought we could bring to the market to make it a lot easier for end users and whole lot easier for administrators."

Analyst firm Gartner remained unimpressed, however: "After two unsuccessful forays into the collaborative market, Oracle is back . . . Gartner believes Beehive is unlikely to be any more successful than previous efforts."

Mark Brown, senior director of collaboration business strategy at Oracle, countered that "Beehive is a new product, not an e-mail platform that's 10-15 years old . . .It isn't an upgrade to Oracle Collaboration Suite 10." Collaboration and security are the product's hallmarks, he stressed.

Europe and the entire EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) market continues to be very strong for Oracle, said Sergio Giacoletto, Oracle's executive vice-president, EMEA. He said that EMEA experienced 34 per cent revenue growth, to $7.9 billion, in the financial year 2008, with 5.7 per cent growth in its database market and 14.4 per cent growth in middleware, according to figures from Gartner.

While the company had seen a 23 per cent drop in EMEA applications sales in the first quarter of the 2009 financial year, Giacoletto insisted this was just a quarterly variation and "no particular issue".

He noted that the company was seeing growth in EMEA in its two new business units, taxation and insurance, "especially in emerging markets". The company's strongest growth is in Russia, Turkey and the Middle East, he said, but noted that in the first quarter, it had been Germany. Growth "may vary from quarter to quarter, but in general, in the Middle East and Africa growth is faster than in western Europe."

Nonetheless, he said that Oracle's push for open standards in some areas of its product line was "important" in Europe, where the European Commission and many individual national governments support open standards and free and open source software projects.

Giacolletto said Oracle's broad product and services portfolio put it in a good position to weather any downturn, and added the company had little presence in the troubled banking sector.

In one of the event's guest keynotes, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini had his own message for the financial world. He said that, hypothetically, if a trader on the New York Stock Exchange had been running a system with Intel's latest, much faster Dunnington processor, it could have saved the trader $33 million in a critical five-minute window on September 15th, when the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 218 points.

Too bad the processor was only introduced in the last two weeks.

The buzz on 'Beehive': customers interested

WHILE MANY analysts initially questioned Oracle's large-scale acquisition strategy, customers seem to be generally happy with the breadth of offerings, with some finding they already used the same products when they weren't under Oracle's roof, anyway.

Take Jonathan Ebsworth, a vice president at consultancy CapGemini in Britain, who advises on information technology for large enterprise customers.

"What we've got now from Oracle is a very clear product strategy with a very rich feature selection," he says.

He's "excited about the hybrid Oracle technologies and the applications" now coming from the company.

"I see Oracle as having best-of-breed middleware [software that connects different programs together] and a huge amount of [application] content" that can be used in services-oriented architecture (SOA), ways of connecting applications to address specific business functions and institutional processes.

For his central government clients, Ebsworth feels the service-enabled applications "should allow us to define solutions more quickly".

However, he would like to see "something more compelling in terms of the interconnection between data".

In particular, he'd like "things to talk to things".

As for the new Web 2.0, social networking software emerging from Oracle, such as the new "Beehive" application launched at OpenWorld, Alex de Vergori, database architect with UK online betting site Betfair, is very interested, but also more cautious.

"I think it [Beehive] is a great idea - but it remains to be seen how it works," he says.

He notes that Betfair incorporates instant messaging, forums, wikis and other social networking technologies already, and believes these are a key element in generating customer betting activity.

"We use all those and it would be nice to use it [to tie them together]."

Ebsworth is a little more reserved. While CapGemini is quite interested in using such technologies internally, among clients they "are on the corporate agenda, but a lot of organisations are seeing that as aspirational rather than something you do right now."

He adds: "It's a journey we're all pretty much at the start of, rather than well down the track."

Source: www.irishtimes.com

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Oracle To Buy Advanced Visual Technology

The retail software maker's products help store owners decide how to arrange stores and manage retail space for best product placement.

Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) on Wednesday agreed to acquire the British firm Advanced Visual Technology, a supplier of 3-D space-planning software for retailers.

The terms of the deal weren't disclosed. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year.

Advanced Visual Technology can present a photo-realistic view of individual stores, then allow a retailer to work with suppliers and partners to design the floor space around the product lines available, Oracle said in announcing the acquisition. Retail is a vertical application market that Oracle has targeted since its acquisition of Retek in 2004 and, more recently, 360Commerce in January.

Oracle is competing with SAP in the retail applications space and is expected to continue to buy application suppliers in the retail space. Up-front applications, such as Advanced Visual Technology, help store owners decide how to arrange stores and manage retail space for best product placement. Such applications are expected to be integrated in the future with Oracle's back-end applications that analyze sales data and project where consumers are spending their money.

Advanced Visual Technology supplements Oracle's financials and back-end business intelligence with storefront "boots on the ground" retail know-how, said Stuart Williams, analyst with Technology Business Research.

Existing Oracle applications cover retail merchandising, inventory, point of service, returns handling, promotion optimization, and master data management.

Employees of AVT will join Oracle's Retail Global Business Unit.

Author: Charles Babcock @ www.informationweek.com

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Oracle offers compression to DBAs

Oracle's powerful new HP Oracle Database Machine comes with 168TB of storage, a new method of retrieving data more quickly and intelligently, and - gulp- a hefty $2.33m (£1.26m) price tag.

It's the turbocharged option for the database administrator with money to burn and a need for speed.

But most DBAs don't get to drive in the fast lane - especially not with IT budgets the way they are. So as a less lavish option for enterprise users, Oracle is touting another approach. That one involves data compression, which has long been a popular way to save storage space and money. Traditionally, though, the trade-off has been high: Gobs of memory and processing power typically are needed to compress data and write it to disks. Even more is needed when the information is later extracted.

Now Oracle claims to have solved this thorny problem with a feature it first introduced in its Oracle 11g database, which was released last year.

By using the Advanced Compression option in 11g, Oracle says, DBAs can shrink database sizes by as much as three-quarters and boost read/write speeds by three to four times, no matter whether they're running a data warehouse or a transaction-processing database - all while incurring little in the way of processor utilisation penalties.

Oracle claims the storage and speed gains are so dramatic that companies using Advanced Compression will no longer need to move old, seldom or non-used data to archives. Instead, they can keep it all in the same production database, even as the amount of data stored there grows into the hundreds of terabytes or even the petabyte range.

"This works completely transparently to your applications," according to Juan Loaiza, Oracle's senior vice president of systems technologies. "It increases CPU usage by just 5 percent, while cutting your [database] table sizes by half."
Oracle says it's responding to the demands of enterprise customers with fast-growing databases. "The envelope is always being pushed," Loaiza said. "Unstructured data is growing very quickly. We expect someone to be running a one-petabyte, 1,000-CPU-core database by 2010."

It's also responding to the fact that storage technology, one of the keys to database performance, has made little progress from a speed standpoint, according to Loaiza. "Disks are getting bigger, but they're not getting a whole lot faster," he said.

Taking data compression down to the block level
Oracle has offered simple index-level compression since the 8i version of its database was introduced in 1999. That improved several years later with the introduction of table-level compression in Oracle 9i Release 2, which helped data warehousing users compress data for faster bulk loads, according to Sushil Kumar, senior director of product management for database manageability, high availability and performance at Oracle.

Advanced Compression provides even finer capabilities, letting the database compress data down to the disk-block level. The algorithm used in the new feature compresses data while keeping track of exactly where information is stored, Kumar said. The result, he claimed, is that when data is extracted by users, the database can focus in like a laser on the exact block on the disk where the information is located, instead of pulling whole tables and sifting through unwanted data.

Other compression schemes "have no idea what's on the disk," Kumar contended. "They can't read part of a document without opening up the entire one."

According to Oracle officials, Advanced Compression is also smart enough not to compress data with every single change to a database, but to instead let the changes accumulate and then run them in batches. That is efficient enough to enable Advanced Compression to work with OLTP databases, which tend to have heavy read/write volumes, said Vineet Marwah, a principal member of the Oracle database staff.

Another component of Advanced Compression, called SecureFiles, can automatically detect, index and compress non-relational data such as Word documents, PDFs or XML files, Marwah said. Oracle also has enhanced its backup compression performance so that it is 40 percent faster in 11g than in the previous version of the database, while not degrading the performance of other database functions, he said.

And because a compressed database is generally much smaller, it shrinks the flow of data between the storage server and database, where bottlenecks tend to occur, Kumar says. The gains are so dramatic that DBAs can dump their complicated partitioning and archiving schemes, he claimed. "A lot of people archive data because they have to, not because they want to," he says. "So if you see a business value in keeping data around, compression is a useful way to not let resource constraints dictate your architecture."

Oracle acknowledges that Advanced Compression isn't a cure-all. For instance, while large table scans "are a whole lot faster, compression doesn't make random-access reads that much faster," Loaiza says. Also, data that has already been compressed, such as a JPEG image, can't be compressed further, according to Kumar.

Oracle's claim of 4:1 compression also isn't the highest level in the database industry. Database analyst Curt Monash pointed out in an online post this week that analytic database start-up Vertica claims compression ratios from 5:1 to as much as 60:1, depending on the type of data.

Kumar declined to comment about Vertica. But during his OpenWorld presentation, he claimed that Oracle's variable-length, block-level compression is more efficient than what is offered in IBM's rival DB2 9 database, not to mention faster. "Because DB2 is so inefficient to begin with, Oracle is the winner any day," Kumar said. He also called the compression offered by data warehousing database vendor Teradata Corp. "very primitive."

But users haven't flocked to Advanced Compression yet. One reason is that it's a paid add-on. A licence costs $11,500 per processor, with updates and support adding an additional $2,530 per CPU. Also, it's available only to users of 11g Enterprise Edition, and Oracle hasn't seen much adoption of 11g thus far. According to Andrew Mendelsohn, Oracle's senior vice president of server technologies, 75 percent of its customers are running 10g, and another 20 percent are still running 9i.

Take what is likely Oracle's biggest customer, LGR Telecommunications, which develops data warehousing systems for telecommunications companies. LGR has built two 300TB data warehouses for AT&T for use in storing and managing the carrier's caller data records, according to Paul Hartley, general manager of LGR's North American operations in Atlanta. The databases, which run concurrently with one another, can scale up to a total of 1.2PB, says Hartley.

But the two data warehouses are based on Oracle 10g, so they can't take advantage of Advanced Compression. LGR does "use compression to some extent today, but we plan to use it extensively in the future," says Hannes van Rooven, a manager at LGR.

Another Oracle customer, Intermap Technologies, is using the spatial-data version of 11g for its 11TB database of digital mapping and imagery data, which is expected to grow to 40TB by the first quarter of 2010, according to Sue Merrigan, senior director of information management at the company. Intermap isn't in the compression camp now. "We don't compress the data because we are concerned it would lose its accuracy," Merrigan says.

That isn't true, responds Kumar, who said that Advanced Compression is a so-called lossless compression scheme.

Rivals such as John Bantleman, CEO of archiving software vendor Clearpace Software, argue that sending old data to archives will continue to boost database performance more than compressing information. Moreover, it isn't much more complicated to do so, Bantleman claims. And using tools such as Clearpace, users can search and extract data archived outside of the database as quickly and conveniently as if the information was stored in it, according to Bantleman.

"A telco might need to maintain its caller data records for years," Bantleman says. "But does it really make sense to keep all of that in your database if regulations only require you to keep access to it for 90 days?" He added that it might seem better "emotionally" to maintain a single data storage environment. "But I think you want to segment the live part of your data for OLTP performance from your highly compressed historical data. These two schemas don't meld well in the same box."

Author: Eric Lai @ www.techworld.com

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