Sun’s systems expertise is top-notch and I have no doubt they will get Exadata 2 to a stage where it offers decent performance, and win accounts, if only those that don’t want to manage multiple vendors or DBA teams or deal with ETL hassles.

Exadata 2 is still a very immature product, however, and it is too early to tell.

Of products you listed ad lines for, Exadata has the fewest and least impressive production references, even behind Aster.

Vendor shindigs can be worth going to for me if I’m going to spend multiple hours talking w/ the right vendor people one-on-one. Otherwise, not so much. I don’t even bother dialing into mass conference calls when I can do so from the convenience of my desk. When Oracle offered the chance to come and meet w/ the development team, alone, at my own expense, a few weeks after Open World last year — THAT I accepted, even though I have a number of vendor clients I don’t spend that much face time with in a year.

Besides, I’m tapped out on travel. I just turned down the opportunity to go SAS’ user conference in October, and they were offering to do it the right way.

I have little doubt that, if Oracle has indeed sold a lot of Exadata, customers have in many cases deployed it and figured out whether or not it works well for them.

I would assume then almost all Exadata unit which has been sold is in use.

1) Exadata is a quite expensise hardware product
so what would be the point in buying and then mot using it? How often a company buy an expensive storage array from, say, EMC, and then decides not to use it?

2) The migration of an existing Oracle warehouse to Exadata seems to be quite straightforward as you don’t have to change your ETL routines, aggregation programs, reports etc. So I don’t see many tecnical obstacles with actually using Exadata after buying it.

3) And as you already know, I still firmly believe that Oracle targets and sells Exadata mainly as a speedup to existing Orale-based DWs, and not as a stand-alone DW platform, so the 2nd point applies in most cases