Oracle and the X-Men

Oracle has just announced the Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine as its answer to the likes of Netezza and other appliance vendors. The project went under the codename of Sage and, while Oracle didn’t tell me more than that, I am guessing that this actually relates to the Marvel character of the same name, pictured right, a member of the X-Men and X-treme X-Men. She is described on the official Marvel site as “a mutant who possesses a cyberpathic mind that functions like a computer with unlimited storage capacity. Sage is able to record and analyze vast amounts of data… and can also calculate complex statistics in mere seconds… like a computer, Sage is able to perform multiple tasks at once by allocating a partition of her brain to each task.”

Anyway, down to the serious stuff. Briefly, the Database Machine is the data warehouse offering and the Exadata Storage Server provides massively parallel capabilities that back-end onto your conventional Oracle database to enable the Database Machine. What happens is that when a query is processed, data is read from disk, unwanted rows and columns are filtered out by the Storage Server and the remaining data is passed to the database for processing. This will provide significantly better performance for queries where you retrieve a lot of extraneous data from disk but will have less impact where that is not the case.

Oracle is claiming up to 10x performance benefits and this seems reasonable. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Oracle will be able to compete effectively with other products. Take a query where you need a full table scan and suppose that that table has 1 million rows each consisting of 60 columns and suppose that you only need to retrieve data from 3 of those columns. Then a column-based database such as Sybase IQ or Vertica only reads those 3 columns so it has 20x less work to do than Oracle. And that doesn’t mean that Oracle will be only half as slow (assuming 10x performance enhancement) because the filtering process (unnecessary if using columns) is still required.

To take another example, Netezza doesn’t just filter the data close to the disk but processes it there too—it is only collation that is done centrally—so you would still expect appliance vendors to outperform the HP Oracle Database Machine.

The margin of performance benefit from appliance vendors will be reduced in some instances but you also have to consider the impact of the Oracle environment as a whole. The key to getting good performance out of Oracle is defined indexes, materialised views and so on. It is when you have unplanned queries or complex analytics where no such structures have been defined that you can run into a performance black hole when using Oracle and which appliance vendors are particularly good at. You may get some benefits from using the Database Machine in these environments but I expect them to pale in comparison to what the appliances offer.

It is noteworthy that no benchmarks have been presented by Oracle in terms of performance: I suspect that this is because, while it is much better than it was before, it still can’t compete across the board with all the new boys on the block. It could probably have put out good benchmarks against IBM and Microsoft but everybody would have spotted the absence of Greenplum, Netezza, ParAccel and the rest, so it wouldn’t have worked as a marketing tool.

Also worth bearing in mind is that while the database may have been pre-installed it will still require administration, and Oracle doesn’t have a reputation as the database requiring the most DBA attention for nothing. If you think that low/minimal administration is a feature of an appliance then this isn’t it.

Leaving that aside, this is certainly a significant step forward but it isn’t ground-breaking. It will encourage existing Oracle shops but I would recommend a proof of concept. In addition, I expect it to hurt IBM and Microsoft (because Oracle should now have clear performance advantages over these vendors in appropriate situations) more than it does the specialist data warehousing vendors. The latter may suffer where it is a close call between staying with Oracle or going elsewhere, but otherwise the appliance and column-based suppliers should still be able to beat Oracle hands down, at least where performance is a major issue.

Which only leaves one question: if the data warehouse is Sage who does that make Larry? Dr Xavier or Magneto?

Author: Philip Howard @ www.it-analysis.com

Read more ...

Oracle Teams With HP On Database Hardware

Oracle in tandem with HP is bringing out its first hardware product, a database machine, which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says is suitable for high end, high performance data warehouses.

Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) in tandem with HP (NYSE: HPQ) is bringing out its first hardware product, a database machine, which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says is suitable for high end, high performance data warehouses.

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference on Wednesday, Ellison said in a keynote address that the HP Oracle Database Machine will combine a grid of Oracle database servers with a grid of HP Exabyte storage servers. The two grids are combined in a standard 42-u rack.

In a departure from other high end designs, the storage server rather than the database server will contain the intelligence to break queries down into separate parts that are executed in parallel on multi-core processors.

In effect, query-handling intelligence has been shifted from the database server to the storage server, which is closer to the data itself. The move allows only results to be passed from storage over to the database system, instead of blocs of data from a voluminous table of a large, 100 Terabyte or 200 Terabyte database. Databases of that size are becoming increasingly common, and the database machine approach will commonly improve performance over software-only, Oracle data warehouses by a factor of up to 30, Ellison said.

"We pass the query from the database server to the query server, where it is parallelized," with a part of the query running on each core of two-way storage server. Up to 14 storage servers or 28, multi-core CPUs are included in the database machine. The now common quad-core CPU would yield a maximum of 112 cores available for parallel query processing, allowing a complex query to be broken down into 112 parts, if necessary, each with its own core.

Each database server and storage server are connected by two InfiniBand channels, each capable of moving a GB of data per second. The 12 disks in an Exabyte Storage Server are capable of delivering only one GB of data per second, conceded Ellison, but the surplus indicated headroom for data warehouse performance to improve in step with disk drive performance. With a storage server grid of 14 units, the amount of data that could be moved per second under current limitations is 14 GB per second, with pipes capable of carrying 28 GB per second.

Ellison said HP and Oracle have been engaged in joint work on the database machine for three years.

The data warehouse machine is expected to compete with Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the market leader in high end data warehousing based on parallel processing, and specialist Netezza (NYSE Arca: NZ), a supplier of data warehouse machines.

Ellison, never shy about making claims against the competition, said the HP Oracle Database Machine would also perform up to 30 times better than an IBM DB2 data warehouse. In press releases and other documentation, Oracle emphasizes performance improvements that are 10 times faster than predecessor Oracle and competitor data warehouses.

No pricing was announced, the database machine has been in use at several key Oracle customer sites for a year, Ellison said, and is available immediately. Oracle is responsible for sales and software system support. HP will assume hardware service.

Netezza President Jim Baum responded with a prepared statement to Oracle's move: "You just can't slap together existing solutions in clever packages The power of the data warehouse appliance lies in integration and design from the ground up. Engineers in the same company, the same building, working to integrate a shared vision--not patch it together with glue and spit."

Author: Charles Babcock @ InformationWeek.com

Read more ...

Oracle promises more cloud love

OpenWorld 08 Oracle is planning partnerships with more cloud computing providers while suggesting it could also deliver cloud services as part of its existing ondemand business.

Executive vice president of product development Chuck Rozwat said Tuesday Oracle's database and software infrastructure sack would "definitely" be updated to work with more providers of cloud computing beyond Amazon's EC2 and S3.

He did not name names or provide dates, but - speaking to press at OpenWorld - indicated he had faith in the future of cloud computing services like EC2.

The currently experimental market will mature into a service for businesses as "people will migrate more and more serious/mission critical applications to the cloud".

"My feeling is people will try it out first, get their IT and business practices down," Rozwat said.

Rozwat called cloud computing an "outgrowth" of what Oracle's being doing for 10 years with its ondemand business.

Asked whether Oracle planned to provide its own server farms for cloud computing, he said Oracle's skills lie in building and optimizing software rather than simply running data centers. Reading between the lines, and given his views on how he expects serious business uptake of cloud in future, that sounded like a "yes" - once there's a business case.

"We have no plans to be in the business of providing just a hardware platform because we think the added value is what we can do around the software, and you call that the cloud," Rozwat said.

Oracle's ondemand business has provided versions of its software to customers on hosted server and storage both on and off customers' premises. Services can be run by customers, Oracle partners or Oracle itself.

Commenting on the work with Amazon, Rozwat said the goal has been to enable customers, partners, and Oracle to use EC2 and S3 easily in conjunction with Oracle's database and middleware products. The crux of the work has been to enable back up to the cloud from Oracle by working with Amazon's virtualization layer.
11g take two

Rozwat, meanwhile, told press that Oracle is still not ready to provide a public delivery date for the next update to its 11g database, released last year. Session after OpenWorld session has focused on 11g, while president Charles Philips announced an interim 11.1.07 release on Monday - although further information on this has so far proved hard to find.

However, there's been no mention of 11g R2 even though it's expected to be relatively big.

Among planned features, the ability to make grids - clustered servers - easier to set up and manage using Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC). "We want to make sure customers have access to a set of new tools we have for better monitoring and to be able to react to some issues in the future," Rozwat said.

Author: Gavin Clarke @ www.theregister.co.uk

Read more ...