DBMS product categories
Analysis of database management technology in specific product categories. Related subjects include:
Exadata and Oracle Database Machine parallelization clarified
Some kind Oracle development managers have reached out and helped me better understand where Oracle does or doesn’t stand in query and analytic parallelization. This post supersedes prior discussions of the subject over the past week. Read more
| Categories: Clustering, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Parallelization | 10 Comments |
Oracle Database Machine performance and compression
Greg Rahn was kind enough to recite in his blog what Oracle has disclosed about the first Exadata testers. I don’t track hardware model details, so I don’t know how the testers’ respective current hardware environments compare to that of the Oracle Database Machine.
Each of the customers cited below received “half” an Oracle Database Machine. As I previously noted, an Oracle Database Machine holds either 14.0 or 46.2 terabytes of uncompressed data. This suggests the 220 TB customer listed below — LGR Telecommunications — got compression of a little under 10:1 for a CDR (Call Detail Record) database. By comparison, Vertica claims 8:1 compression on CDRs.
Greg also writes of POS (Point Of Sale) data being used for the demo. If you do the arithmetic on the throughput figures (13.5 vs. a little over 3), compression was a little under 4.5:1. I don’t know what other vendors claim for POS compression.
Here are the details Greg posted about the four most open Oracle Database Machine tests: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Exadata, Oracle, Telecommunications | 9 Comments |
Oracle Exadata list pricing
The figures in this post have now been updated. There’s a new spreadsheet at that link as well.
I’ve been trying to figure out how much Oracle Exadata actually costs. My first cut comes up with prices of $58-190K/TB (user data), based on a total system price of $5,322,000, and user data figures of 28 and 92.4 TB for the two available sizes of disk drive. But of course there are a lot of uncertainties in these figures. You can use this spreadsheet (Edit: That’s the old one) to see where the final numbers come from, and to modify the estimates as you see fit. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 10 Comments |
Oracle Exadata Smart Scan Join Processing
Oracle has put up an Exadata white paper (hat tip to Kevin Closson’s Exadata FAQ). There’s a section on Smart Scan Join Processing. Sounds exciting, huh? It reads, in its entirety:
Exadata performs joins between large tables and small lookup tables, a very common scenario for data warehouses with star schemas. This is implemented using Bloom Filters, which are a very efficient probabilistic method to determine whether a row is a member of the desired result set.
Jeez. That almost sounds as if Exadata is an immature, Release 1 data warehouse appliance!
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle | 14 Comments |
So what does Oracle Exadata mean for HP Neoview?
That HP is committed to selling a lot of data warehouse hardware — and probably data warehouse appliances in particular — seems obvious, for reasons including:
- HP bought a big BI/data warehousing consulting operation in Knightsbridge.
- HP has put considerable effort into its data warehouse appliance Neoview.
- HP CEO Mark Hurd comes from data warehouse appliance vendor Teradata.
- Data warehousing where the big bucks are.
But Oracle Exadata could produce those appliance sales. So where does HP Neoview fit in?
I was told by an investor today that HP’s investor relations department is saying Oracle Exadata is a Netezza competitor, while Neoview is more in the Teradata market. That’s laughable. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, HP and Neoview, Netezza, Teradata | 16 Comments |
Another round of discussion on in-memory OLTP data management
Oracle Exadata was pre-teased as “Extreme performance.” Some incorrect speculation shortly before the announcement focused on the possibility of OLTP without disk, which clearly would speed things up a lot. I interpret that in part as being wishful thinking. 🙂
The most compelling approach I’ve seen to that problem yet is H-Store, which however makes some radical architectural assumptions. One point I didn’t stress in my earlier posts, but which turned out to be a deal-breaker for one early tire-kicker, is that to use H-Store you have to be able to shoehorn each transaction into its own stored procedure. Depending on how intricate your logic is, that might make it hard to port an existing app to H-Store.
Even for new apps, it could get in the way of some things you might want to do, such as rule-based processing. And that could be a problem. A significant fraction of the highest-performance OLTP apps are customer-facing, and customer-facing apps are one of the biggest areas where rule-based processing comes into play.
| Categories: In-memory DBMS, Memory-centric data management, OLTP, VoltDB and H-Store | 3 Comments |
Oracle Exadata and Oracle data warehouse appliance sound bites
In addition to my previously posted thoughts on the Oracle Exadata/data warehouse appliance announcement, let me offer some more concise observations.
- Microsoft had leapfrogged Oracle with its DATAllegro acquisition. Now Oracle’s back in the game.
- But Oracle Exadata Release 1 is hardly going to put Teradata, Netezza, or Greenplum out of business.
- After long denying it, Oracle has finally admitted that putting more than 10 TB on Oracle had been an extremely painful thing to do.
- Oracle’s idea of splitting database processing between a couple of types of server is a smart one, and is consistent with what multiple other vendors are doing.
- Medium-long term, the Exadata technical strategy could work very well. Exadata storage management addresses some of the problems with shared-everything; Oracle RAC addresses other; and it may not take many releases before Oracle gets query parallelization right as well. Edit: This point is superseded by my updated take on Oracle query parallelization.
- Now Oracle and Microsoft are both supporting Infiniband for high end data warehousing.
- Oracle’s Exadata-based appliance doesn’t have the out-of-the-box simplicity that other appliances and analytic DBMS do.
- Licensing details aren’t yet clear, but Oracle Exadata’s list price probably won’t be terribly appealing either. Of course, nobody in their right mind pays Oracle list prices anyway.
- New web-based businesses have no reason to buy the Oracle data warehouse appliance. Exadata makes sense only for established enterprises.
Contradicting all that potential goodness, Oracle has been making ringing anti-shared-nothing statements, such as the silly:
There are “speed-of-light issues” associated with … scale-out-style grids
That mindset doesn’t auger well for Oracle to ever be a fully competitive high-end data warehouse DBMS vendor.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle | 5 Comments |
Oracle announcements next week, data warehouse appliance, 11g R2 or otherwise
Eric Lai and Chris Kanarcus put up an article on Oracle’s announcements next week. Much of the speculation revolved around generic grid/clustering, with more detail than I posted yesterday. Most interesting to me was the last section of the article, which sounds as if it could be talking about the same thing Luke Lonergan referred to in a comment thread when he said:
Oracle is about to unveil a secret project that uses HP DL185 servers as storage devices with some predicate pushdowns to implement a data warehouse “appliance”.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Oracle | 1 Comment |
Netezza overseas
22% of Netezza’s revenue comes from outside the US, at least if we use last quarter’s figures as a guide. At first blush, that doesn’t sound like much. Indeed, percentage-wise it surely lags behind Teradata, Greenplum (which has sold a lot in Asia/Pacific under Netezza’s former head of that region), and a few smaller competitors headquartered outside the US. But a few conversations I had today suggest a rosier view. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Kognitio, Market share and customer counts, Netezza, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
Netezza application areas
I’m at the Netezza “Enzee” user conference in Orlando. So one or more Netezza posts are in order.
One theme of the brief analyst meeting was Netezza’s increasing business focus on vertical markets. In particular, Netezza is hiring managers for a range of vertical markets. The commercial ones cited (at various levels of maturity) included: Read more