• Given Oracle’s market penetration and share, it makes sense that Oracle is focused on selling add-on products to its installed base. Oracle’s three top such go-to-market emphases at the moment are:
  • Database consolidation, especially on Exadata.
  • Data warehousing, presumably on Exadata.
  • Database security, especially encryption. This is not Exadata-specific, but does exploit Intel Westmere on-chip encryption, which Oracle says allows encryption with minimal overhead. This seems to be via something called Oracle Advanced Security.
• Deleted*

*Oracle asked me to delete a point on pricing they went out of their way to make, because they are in quiet period — even though nobody said it was confidential at the time, we weren’t under NDA, and it looks like public information to me anyway. Frankly, I’m not sure I was right to comply.

Oracle also told me quite a bit about Exadata onsite POCs (Proofs of Concept) and Exadata references, but I’ll save those subjects for future posts. The same goes for workload management.

Oracle’s version names and numbers can get confusing, but it turns out that:

• Oracle 11.203 11.2.0.3 will come out this fall. Oracle 11.204 11.2.0.4 will come out a little more than a year later. After that I imagine it will be time for Oracle 12.
• The current versions of Oracle Exadata are Exadata X2-2 and Exadata X2-8.
  • Oracle Exadata 2-2 is evolutionary from prior Exadata versions, and has 8 moderately big servers per rack. It can be sliced into half- or quarter-racks.
  • Oracle Exadata 2-8, in lieu of those 8 servers, has 2 bigger SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) systems, each with a terabyte of RAM. You can’t slice Exadata 2-8 below full-rack size, as you’d lose redundancy among the servers.

I didn’t really understand the discussion as to why certain workloads and/or workload consolidations go better on the SMP boxes of Exadata X2-8 than the blades of Exadata X2-2, but Oracle assures me that some do. I also suspect that some Oracle customers prefer large SMP boxes for no good reason other than familiarity.

As for recent-release adoption:

• Oracle estimates that 40-50% of customers have Oracle 11g running somewhere in their shops, mainly Oracle 11g Release 2.
• All major ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) are certified on Oracle 11g, typically Oracle 11g Release 2.
• But Exadata certification is something different from Oracle 11g certification; for example, SAP certification on Exadata is still underway, targeted for some time this year.

Exadata obviously enjoys huge performance gains over existing Oracle installations for certain analytic queries, and therefore for some whole analytic workloads. Oracle has happily trumpeted these. But it turns out that Exadata’s OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) performance gains are less dramatic. This makes all kinds of sense, given that Oracle’s analytic query performance was in pretty bad shape pre-Exadata, while OLTP has been just fine. The range Oracle used was 2-3X OLTP performance gains vs. existing Oracle installations on several-year-old hardware. Oracle says somewhere over 50% of Exadata physical I/O* goes against flash cache in uses cases such as running Oracle’s application suite.

*Note that physical I/O may be only a small fraction of logical; e.g., SAP long ago said that >99% of SAP transactions never hit disk.

Finally, we talked about a variety of options or other related products. Highlights included:

• One piece of the Oracle security story is a new product called Oracle Database Firewall, released in January, based on an acquisition of a small startup last year. Targeted primarily at internal hackers, Oracle Database Firewall sniffs your SQL traffic for a week or so, observes what kinds of SQL statements can be expected, builds a white list accordingly, and casts a jaundiced eye on any other kind of SQL statements that come through.
• Edit: I have no idea why I was told the following, in view of a subsequent email. Oracle Active Data Guard, first introduced in the Oracle 11g code line, is the preferred way to do active-active Oracle replication. That said:
  • Not a lot of customers use Oracle Active Data Guard yet …
  • … but a considerable fraction of Exadata users are at least interested in it.
  • Some number of Oracle customers have other kinds of active-active implementation. One option is via GoldenGate.
• Oracle Cloud File Management System is an Oracle 11g feature/option that lets you managed non-Oracle data. It is related to ASM (Automatic Storage Management), which seems to have been the most popular Oracle 10g feature, and which is essential to Exadata. Oracle Cloud File Management Systems seems to be popular for consolidation uses. But it is not technically well suited to, for example, play the role of HDFS in a MapReduce implementation.
• For DBAs who care, Exadata now supports Solaris on the database server tier as well as Linux. (That would be Solaris on Intel, of course; Exadata doesn’t use Sparc.) The storage tier still runs only on a kind of embedded Linux.
• Oracle 11g Express Edition (free crippleware) just went into beta test.
• And finally, Oracle SQL Developer 3.0 features, among other things, a GUI for Oracle Data Mining, and migration tools. Sybase migration is in there now, and was enhanced for SQL Developer 3.0. Teradata migration is slated for the next release.

This piqued my interest, so — recalling that ANTs is a public company — I decided to take a look at just how successful their software products business is. Well, for the quarter ended March 31, 2010, ANTs’ 10-Q filing says (emphasis mine): 

The Company’s revenues for the three months ended March 31, 2010 and 2009 include service revenues representing managed and professional service fees for database and network maintenance and support services. Revenues for the three months ended March 31, 2010 were $1.5 million, an increase of $0.1 million compared to $1.4 million for the three months ended March 31, 2009.  For the three months ended March 31, 2010, two customers accounted for 96% of the Company’s gross revenues (Company A, 72% and Company B, 24%) compared to three customers that accounted for 97% of the Company’s gross revenues for the three months ended March 31, 2009 (Company A, 57%, Company B, 29% and Company C, 10%). The increase in revenues for the three months ended March 31, 2010 over the comparable period in 2009 is primarily attributable to professional service projects for Company A that were initiated during or subsequent to the three months ended March 31, 2009, partially offset by professional service projects for Company B and Company C that were completed subsequent to March 31, 2009.

Conditional on the Company’s technology developments being successful, the presence of customer demand and the Company having a competitive advantage, future revenues may include sales and licenses of its ANTs Compatibility Server (“ACS”) product and managed services revenue related to existing and new contracts and professional services revenue from pre- and post-sales consulting related to ACS and other database consolidation technologies. Sales of the Company’s first ACS product, which translates from Sybase to Oracle, have been limited due to the structure of the sales arrangement and go-to-market strategy. As such, the Company has structured the go-to-market strategy for the second ACS product differently via the use of an Original Equipment Manufacturer (“OEM”) agreement. Pursuant to the OEM agreement, ANTs is responsible for technology development specifically tailored to the OEM’s needs. The OEM will assume responsibility for marketing, sales and support of the technology on a worldwide basis, while ANTs will be the preferred service provider for migration projects. The Company is currently in the process of developing the second ACS product for a planned announcement and release in mid-2010. The Company intends to develop additional ACS products based on market demand and the availability of resources for development.

In other words, as of four months ago ANTs had had $0 in business in what it says is its main product area, which is pretty much the range the company has been in throughout its complicated history.  Kozak’s post did link to a claim that IBM has experienced over 300 migrations to DB2. However, that figure includes Oracle-to-DB2 migrations that having nothing to do with ANTs. And by the way, IBM’s migration strategy is focused largely on ISVs, so the whole Sybase-ANTs dust-up may be about a type of business (direct capture by DB2 of Sybase ASE enterprise customers) nobody’s sales force is seriously pursuing.

True, the Sybase-to-DB2 emulation technology hadn’t been released as of then. Even so, I think it’s a wee bit early for ANTs to be acting as if there’s been any proof it ever has had or will have any significant market success.

*The comment threads are the most informative parts of those posts.

I’m a little unclear as to the Netezza Migrator details, not least because Netezza folks don’t seem to care too much about Netezza Migrator themselves. That said, the core ideas of Netezza Migrator are: 

• Netezza Migrator is an enhanced (?) version of EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus Advanced Server DBMS. (Recall that Postgres Plus is PostgreSQL-based and fairly Oracle-compatible.)
• Netezza Migrator does not run on Netezza appliances, but rather on conventional computers off to the side.
• Netezza Migrator generally farms out queries to Netezza appliances, but can also manage data itself. (That latter part could supposedly come in handy for small tables one might want to execute stored procedures against.)
• Netezza Migrator does a better job of farming out queries (and also inserts/updates/loads) to Netezza appliances than an Oracle DBMS would. The two biggest examples of that are:
  • Oracle will farm out SELECTs, but not JOINs.
  • Oracle won’t invoke Netezza’s parallel/bulk load capabilities.

• Nothing in my original short post about Clustrix was actually incorrect.
• Clustrix plans to reveal actual production “name-brand” customers soon.
• The name of Clustrix’s software, or at least the guts thereof, is Sierra.
• Clustrix’s products have actually been in general availability since last quarter, with some versions at customer sites for 2 years. Development started 3 ½ years ago.
• Clustrix says its technology is for OLTP systems, which it calls “non-batch/non-analytic,” with mixed read/write workloads. All Clustrix’s example target markets are “internet verticals,” such as photo sharing, gaming, social media, e-commerce, etc.
• Clustrix’s heart is in SQL, as is most of its customer base. Clustrix Sierra’s key-value-store option has little or no performance advantage over Clustrix Sierra’s SQL option, nor any other advantage over SQL that came up in discussion.
• Clustrix Sierra is “wire-compatible” with MySQL, but doesn’t use MySQL code; Clustrix wrote all the code itself.
• Clustrix asserts that Clustrix Sierra supports the “vast majority” of MySQL features. Examples of MySQL features Clustrix doesn’t support at this time are full-text search and geospatial indexing.
• Indeed, Clustrix claims Clustrix Sierra can be used to replace MySQL with few or zero changes to existing applications.
• I specifically asked about referential integrity, which has a poor performance reputation in MySQL. Besides saying they supported it, Clustrix said that some customers actually use referential integrity in some of their less active tables.
• Clustrix Sierra is fully ACID-compliant, with no eventual consistency or RYW consistency story. The default number of copies of each datum is two, and they’re kept consistent via two-phase commit.
• Clustrix Sierra is fully parallel, with no “head” node. I forgot to ask how it was determined which queries would be addressed to and/or controlled by which nodes, but I presume there’s some sort of a load-balancing scheme.
• Clustrix says that because Clustrix Sierra uses MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control), and thus reads and writes don’t block each other, global locks aren’t a major issue. (They’re rare or short or something – I have trouble seeing why they would be non-existent.)
• Clustrix says there’s a second class of locks and latches that are purely local and short-lived, for B-tree indexes and the like. (I didn’t drill down into those either.) I guess this means Clustrix Sierra is B-tree-centric, which makes sense for an OLTP-oriented system.
• Clustrix Sierra distributes data among nodes via consistent hashing (default), range partitioning, or “full distribution”(i.e., copying a – presumably small – table to each node). The choice of distribution plans is manual now; more automation is a future feature.
• Clustrix Sierra’s CBO (Cost-Based Optimizer) is, as one would hope, distribution-aware.
• Clustrix Sierra compiles query fragments and ships them off to the relevant nodes. A fragment might contain both instructions for SQL to be executed locally and for where data is to be sent next.
• Clustrix says that Clustrix Sierra does data migration and redistribution (e.g., when you add a node) transparently online, and further says that in practice this doesn’t cause a performance hit.
• As for Clustrix hardware:
  • Clustrix makes Type I appliances.
  • A Clustrix node contains 2 quad-core chips, 32 gigs of RAM, and 7 160 GB solid-state drives.
  • Specifically, Clustrix is using Intel SSDs, with a SAS interface.
  • Clustrix says solid-state memory isn’t really essential to the product design; it’s just cheap in terms of $/IOPS (I/O Per Second).
• A minimum Clustrix configuration is 3 nodes, for redundancy. After that you can add nodes one at a time. Clustrix says it built a 20-node system in-house, leading me to suspect that customers don’t have anything bigger than 20 nodes either.
• That 20-node Clustrix system was tested to show near-linear scalability. (In discussing this, Clustrix tends to forget to use the word “near”.)
• Clustrix has partnered with somebody to provide global 4-hour-response support. As of now Clustrix seems to be active mainly in North America and Europe.
• Clustrix is formed from the combination of two startups, which I’ve heard elsewhere were called Clustrix and Sprout. Exactly when the combination happened sounds a little different depending on who’s telling the story (one version has the predecessors still being separate well into 2008, but Clustrix implies the combination happened pretty much on Day 1).

• MUMPS, the original Intersystems technology, was focused on health care.
• The reasons Intersystems went object-oriented have a lot to do with the structure of health-care records.
• Intersystems’ biggest and most visible ISVs are in the health-care area.
• Intersystems is actually beginning to sell an electronic health records system called TrakCare around the world (but not in the US, where it has lots of large competitive VARs).

Note: Intersystems Cache’ is sold mainly through VARs (Value-Added Resellers), aka ISVs/OEMs. I.e., it’s sold by people who write applications on top of it.

So far as I understand – and this is still pretty vague and apt to be partially erroneous – the Intersystems Cache’ technical story goes something like this:

• Intersystems Cache’ is an object-oriented DBMS.
• The preferred language for talking to Intersystems Cache’ is Java.
• Intersystems claims Cache’ has good SQL performance, for most kinds of use-case.
• Intersystems Cache’ stores data in a kind of sparse hierarchy. It uses a lot of “common character count” compression, which sounds a lot to me like Patricia tries.
• Intersystems has recently bundled some BI/reporting tools into the Cache’ stack. Surely not coincidentally, Intersystems once told me that some of its ISVs paid more to Crystal Reports than to Intersystems.
• Intersystems Cache’ has had Sybase emulation for several years, and just added Informix emulation. Most but not all stored procedures from those other DBMS run against Cache’ as well.
• Intersystems Cache’ recently added a bunch of manageability, security, etc. features, the details of which generally inspired “Oh, you didn’t have that earlier?” reactions in me.
• Intersystems’ just did a revamp of the Cache’ object model to make it more Smalltalk-like, in which messages are set to parent rather than child classes when appropriate. Thus, when you recompile a class, you don’t also have to recompile all its children, and incremental recompilation is now near-instantaneous. (Put that one in the “Oh, you didn’t have that earlier?” category too.) Versioning will be better as well.
• In the latest release, Cache’ has added what Intersystems calls “Java Event Processing.” This doesn’t sound like CEP (Complex Event Processing), and I forgot to ask whether it was memory-centric at all. Anyhow, the idea is to bang objects into the database really quickly, having them be immediately available for SQL query. “Really quickly” means >10,000 objects/core/second, with one test at the European Space Agency getting up to 85,000. By way of contrast, Intersystems asserts (based on bake-offs) that RDBMS competitors have to insert into BLOBs to get competitive performance, with associated loss of queryability.

Finally, a few financial highlights:

• Intersystems did a little over $1/4 billion in revenue in 2009.
• 85% of that was Cache’.
• Revenue growth was slightly positive in 2009, and 15% in 2008.
• Headcount growth was 25% in 2009 and is planned to be big again in 2010, after being modest in prior years.

]]> http://www.dbms2.com/2010/01/15/intersystems-cache-highlights/feed/ 5 http://www.dbms2.com/2009/08/05/dataupia-is-officially-for-sale/ http://www.dbms2.com/2009/08/05/dataupia-is-officially-for-sale/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:46:34 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.dbms2.com/?p=862 Dataupia marketing VP Samantha Stone — who by the way has been one heck of a trooper through Dataupia’s troubles — is joining the exodus from the company.  General graciousness aside, the heart of Samantha’s farewell email reads:

Unfortunately, we have had to reduce our burn rate as we seek an acquirer for our technology.

We have a group of loyal employees remaining on staff focused on current production customers and the acquisition efforts.

As part of the most recent staff reductions I will be leaving Dataupia.

Two years ago I wrote:

[Dataupia would] make a great acquisition for a BI company or DBMS vendor who could then say “Oh, no, this isn’t a DBMS appliance – it’s merely a data warehouse accelerator.” When you look at it that way, their chances of prospering look distinctly higher.

But at this point I think there probably would be more appealing ways for those vendors to meet the same needs.

]]> http://www.dbms2.com/2009/08/05/dataupia-is-officially-for-sale/feed/ 13 http://www.dbms2.com/2009/06/10/two-lessons-from-dataupias-troubles/ http://www.dbms2.com/2009/06/10/two-lessons-from-dataupias-troubles/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:39:59 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.dbms2.com/?p=810 I’ve been beating my head against the wall trying to convince startups of two well-established truisms:

• Experience consistently shows that the demand for transparency/emulation features isn’t as great as entrepreneurs hope.
• If a startup’s competitors sell directly to enterprises, an indirect sales strategy rarely succeeds.

Maybe one or the other will learn from Dataupia’s example.

The article goes on to discuss difficulties Dataupia has had in raising another round of financing.  During Dataupia’s very long CEO search — which I kept hearing about from people who’d been approached for the job — it was obvious money wouldn’t come in until a CEO was found. But it seems that even with a new CEO, existing investors are reluctant to re-up without a new investor as well, and that new investment is slow in happening.

On the plus side, the article quotes Samantha as saying founder Foster Hinshaw is recovering well from his heart surgery.

• Articles
• Blogs
• Downloads
• Surprisingly, so far as I can tell, no forums

If you’re a Teradata user, you absolutely should check out Teradata DevX.  If you just research Teradata — my situation — there are some aspects that might be of interest anyway.  In particular, I found Teradata’s downloads instructive, most particularly those in the area of extensibility.  Mainly, these are UDFs (User-Defined Functions), in areas such as:

• Compression
• Geospatial data
• Imitating Oracle or DB2 UDFs (as migration aids)

Also of potential interest is a custom-portlet framework for Teradata’s management tool Viewpoint.  A straightforward use would be to plunk some Viewpoint data into a more general system management dashboard.  A yet cooler use — and I couldn’t get a clear sense of whether anybody’s ever done this yet — would be to offer end users some insight as to how long their queries are apt to run.

Key points include:

• This really is more like Oracle emulation than it is transparency, a term I carelessly used before.
• IBM’s Oracle emulation effort is focused on two technological goals:
  • Making it easy for an Oracle application to be ported to DB2.
  • Making it easy for an Oracle developer to develop for DB2.
• The initial target market for DB2′s Oracle emulation is ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) much more than it is enterprises. IBM suggested there were a couple hundred early adopters, and those are primarily in the ISV area.

Because of Oracle’s market share, many ISVs focus on Oracle as the underlying database management system for their applications, whether or not they actually resell it along with their own software. IBM proposed three reasons why such ISVs might want to support DB2:

• Oracle is expensive. In particular, IBM suggested it is more flexible on licensing terms for resale than Oracle is. I find that easy to believe.
• Hey, there’s a DB2 market or installed base out there of some size — why not address it?
• Acquisition-fueled expansion in applications makes Oracle a much bigger competitor to many ISVs (all around the world) than it used to be before. That one makes all kinds of sense.

And by the way — if I wanted an Oracle-emulating DBMS, I’d feel a lot happier about doing business with IBM than I would with EnterpriseDB.

IBM feels that DB2′s Oracle compatibility is a strict superset of EnterpriseDB’s, which it presumably has carried over more or less in its entirety. I didn’t press too hard for examples of what Oracle emulation DB2 offers and EnterpriseDB doesn’t, but IBM did say something about support for more programming languages. IBM was clear on one broad area where DB2 does not offer Oracle emulation, which is the specifics of various kinds of datatype support or other specialized data access methods. For example, IBM has its own syntax for querying text, geospatial, or XML data, and has not added support for Oracle’s alternative approaches.