Comments on: Oracle gives a few customer database size examples

By: Comments on the Gartner 2009/2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant : DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:23:01 +0000

[...] Gartner says Oracle’s offering has finally become “accepted” in the market for databases >50 TB. I guess I can live with that fairly weak claim, but I wouldn’t go much further than that. [...]

By: Yahoo’s wants to do decapetabyte-scale data warehousing in Hadoop | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:05:11 +0000

[...] is moving as much of its analytics to Hadoop as possible. Much of this is being moved away from Oracle and from Yahoo’s own [...]

By: Greg Rahn

Greg Rahn — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:30:29 +0000

@Curt

I pretty sure that all the systems mentioned on the call are systems that have been live in production for at least a few years now.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:57:49 +0000

Thanks, Greg.

Are they live production at all?

By: Greg Rahn

Greg Rahn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:17:53 +0000

@Curt

I don’t believe that any of the database systems mentioned there are live production on Exadata as of today.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:39:23 +0000

Updates above, as per comments here or in private.

@Greg — would you know whether all the databases cited are actually running on some version of Exadata?

By: Greg Rahn

Greg Rahn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:38:27 +0000

@Curt

I confirmed that the Yahoo database mentioned on the call is indeed the one I thought it was and is not “Yahoo’s first-generation data warehouse, which has been largely superseded by an internal system more than 10X that size”. Also, the 700TB is a true “user data” number.

@Fazal

The Nielsen Company is a global company and most certainly has more than one data warehouse, probably even multiple data warehouses/marts per continent. I’m quite certain the 45 terabytes of Oracle datamarts is a current and active install somewhere in the world.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:20:32 +0000

Greg,

Unfortunately, of the two meetings I had with Yahoo in August, the one about which I have not yet received clearance to post details is the one that discussed Yahoo’s three generations of data warehousing on the advertising side of the business.

By: Greg Rahn

Greg Rahn — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:30:32 +0000

@Curt

The Yahoo database [of 700 terabytes] is of course Yahoo’s first-generation data warehouse, which has been largely superseded by an internal system more than 10X that size.

I’m doubtful that your assertion is true. If the database mentioned from Yahoo! is the one that I believe it to be (one that I worked on), it is only a year or so old.

By: Fazal Majid

Fazal Majid — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 06:09:47 +0000

Note the weasel words (although comparing Oracle salespeople to weasels is highly insulting for the noble weasel). They’re just saying the clients in question have warehouses that size. Not that the said clients are happy.

Netezza explicitly claims Nielsen ditched their Oracle warehouse for a Netezza appliance, because ComScore (an Aster customer) was eating their lunch due to the poor performance of their existing Oracle and PL/SQL solution.

Unless Nielsen explicitly rescind their Oracle licenses and return them, something they would be crazy to do, Oracle can still claim with a straight face Nielsen is an Oracle customer.

Of couse, the proof in the pudding will be whether Nielsen pays Oracle its pound of flesh, a.k.a. maintenance contract, to keep future upgrade rights for licenses they no longer use…

No wonder Oracle software license sales are falling, and they are so desperate to jack up maintenance contract rates.