Oracle

Analysis of software titan Oracle and its efforts in database management, analytics, and middleware. Related subjects include:

January 22, 2010

Two cornerstones of Oracle’s database hardware strategy

After several months of careful optimization, Oracle managed to pick the most inconvenient* day possible for me to get an Exadata update from Juan Loaiza. But the call itself was long and fascinating, with the two main takeaways being:

And by the way, Oracle doesn’t make its storage-tier software available to run on anything than Oracle-designed boxes.  At the moment, that means Exadata Versions 1 and 2. Since Exadata is by far Oracle’s best DBMS offering (at least in theory), that means Oracle’s best database offering only runs on specific Oracle-sold hardware platforms. Read more

December 29, 2009

This and that

I have various subjects backed up that I don’t really want to write about at traditional blog-post length.  Here are a few of them. Read more

December 14, 2009

Oracle lifts the cloud hanging over MySQL storage engine vendors

Oracle has put out a press release promising to play nicely with MySQL if its Sun takeover is approved. The parts in italics below are quotes. My comments are in plain text.

1. Continued Availability of Storage Engine APIs. Oracle shall maintain and periodically enhance MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture to allow users the flexibility to choose from a portfolio of native and third party supplied storage engines.

MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture shall mean MySQL’s current practice of using, publicly-available, documented application programming interfaces to allow storage engine vendors to “plug” into the MySQL database server. Documentation shall be consistent with the documentation currently provided by Sun.

Well, duh.

2. Non-assertion. As copyright holder, Oracle will change Sun’s current policy and shall not assert or threaten to assert against anyone that a third party vendor’s implementations of storage engines must be released under the GPL because they have implemented the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.

A commercial license will not be required by Oracle from third party storage engine vendors in order to implement the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.

Oracle shall reproduce this commitment in contractual commitments to storage vendors who at present have a commercial license with Sun.

This is the biggie, lifting a major cloud from the MySQL storage engine business. It sounds like the third of four options I suggested as to how Oracle could legitimately earn antitrust approval of its MySQL takeover. Sure, Infobright, Kickfire, et al. already had what they saw as adequate safeguards or contingency plans vs. Oracle skullduggery. It’s still big even so.

(Quoted out of order.) The geographic scope of these commitments shall be worldwide and these commitments shall continue until the fifth anniversary of the closing of the transaction.

Not a disaster, but with respect to at least point #2 there should be no time limit whatsoever. I’d like to see the EC require that change as a further Oracle concession.

Read more

December 11, 2009

Notes on RainStor, the company formerly known as Clearpace

Information preservation* DBMS vendor Clearpace officially changed its name to RainStor this week. RainStor is also relocating its CEO John Bantleman and more generally its headquarters to San Francisco. This all led to a visit with John and his colleague Ramon Chen, highlights of which included: Read more

October 25, 2009

Reports of perfectly-balanced hardware configurations are greatly exaggerated

Data warehouse appliance and software appliance vendors like to claim that they’ve worked out just the right hardware configuration(s), and that a single configuration is correct for a fairly broad range of workloads. But there are a lot of reasons to be dubious about that. Specific vendor evidence includes:

What’s more, the claim never made a lot of sense anyway. With the rarest of exceptions, even a single data warehouse’s workload will contain different queries that strain different parts of the system in different ratios. Calculating the “ideal” hardware configuration for that single workload would be forbiddingly difficult. And even if one could calculate it, it almost surely would be different than another user’s “ideal” configuration. How a single hardware configuration can be “ideally balanced” for a broad class of use cases boggles the imagination.

October 6, 2009

Oracle Exadata customers presenting at Oracle Open World

Greg Rahn tweeted a list of Exadata-focused sessions at Oracle Open World next week. As Oracle employees and supporters have been foreshadowing, there will be Exadata users and user-like folks presenting. I identified what look like half a dozen (not counting any who, for example, will make surprise appearances at keynote addresses), specifically: Read more

October 6, 2009

Oracle and Vertica on compression and other physical data layout features

In my recent post on Exadata pricing, I highlighted the importance of Oracle’s compression figures to the discussion, and the uncertainty about same. This led to a Twitter discussion featuring Greg Rahn* of Oracle and Dave Menninger and Omer Trajman of Vertica.  I also followed up with Omer on the phone. Read more

October 6, 2009

Oracle’s version of “actually, we’ve been doing MapReduce all along too”

In a recent blog post, Jean-Pierre Dijcks of Oracle makes the argument that Oracle has supported MapReduce all along, essentially because:

Oracle doesn’t appear to have an explicit Map/Reduce programming interface, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle Consulting cranked one out at some point to meet customer demand.

The post goes on to claim the usual in-database MapReduce benefit of avoiding the overhead of intermediate query result materialization. Presumably, then, Oracle’s quasi-MapReduce would also lack query fault-tolerance.

October 5, 2009

Oracle Exadata 2 capacity pricing

Summary of Oracle Exadata 2 capacity pricing

Analyzing Oracle Exadata pricing is always harder than one would first think. But I’ve finally gotten around to doing an Oracle Exadata 2 pricing spreadsheet. The main takeaways are:

Longer version

When Oracle introduced Exadata last year it was, well, expensive. Exadata 2 has now been announced, and it is significantly cheaper than Exadata 1 per terabyte of user data, based on:

Read more

October 1, 2009

Yahoo wants to do decapetabyte-scale data warehousing in Hadoop

My old client Mark Tsimelzon moved over to Yahoo after Coral8 was acquired, and I caught up with him last month. He turns out to be running development for a significant portion of Yahoo’s Hadoop effort — everything other than HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System). Yahoo evidently plans to, within a year or so, get Hadoop to the point that it is managing 10s of petabytes of data for Yahoo, with reasonable data warehousing functionality.

Highlights of our visit included:

Read more

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