Exadata
Analysis of Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Database Machine. Related subjects include:
Links and observations
I’m back from a trip to the SF Bay area, with a lot of writing ahead of me. I’ll dive in with some quick comments here, then write at greater length about some of these points when I can. From my trip: Read more
Advice for some non-clients
Edit: Any further anonymous comments to this post will be deleted. Signed comments are permitted as always.
Most of what I get paid for is in some form or other consulting. (The same would be true for many other analysts.) And so I can be a bit stingy with my advice toward non-clients. But my non-clients are a distinguished and powerful group, including in their number Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and most of the BI vendors. So here’s a bit of advice for them too.
Oracle. On the plus side, you guys have been making progress against your reputation for untruthfulness. Oh, I’ve dinged you for some past slip-ups, but on the whole they’ve been no worse than other vendors.’ But recently you pulled a doozy. The analyst reports section of your website fails to distinguish between unsponsored and sponsored work.* That is a horrible ethical stumble. Fix it fast. Then put processes in place to ensure nothing that dishonest happens again for a good long time.
*Merv Adrian’s “report” listed high on that page is actually a sponsored white paper. That Merv himself screwed up by not labeling it clearly as such in no way exonerates Oracle. Besides, I’m sure Merv won’t soon repeat the error — but for Oracle, this represents a whole pattern of behavior.
Oracle. And while I’m at it, outright dishonesty isn’t your only unnecessary credibility problem. You’re also playing too many games in analyst relations.
HP. Neoview will never succeed. Admit it to yourselves. Go buy something that can. Read more
Breakthrough: Exadata now has as many reference accounts as Aster Data!
According to Bob Evans of Information Week, there now are 15 disclosed Exadata reference accounts. Coincidentally, there are exactly 15 logos on Aster Data’s customer page. So on it own, that’s not a particularly impressive piece of information.
But other highlights of his column include:
- Some of those accounts are rather big-name. However, I’m not at all sure whether they’re actual production references.
- Andy Mendelsohn characterizes the sweet spot of Exadata’s market as “virtual private cloud.” That matches what Juan Loaiza told me six months ago.
- Oracle claims numerous competitive wins for Exadata. Let me hasten to note that one vendor’s “competitive win” is another vendor’s “our salesman read the deal as an unfavorable one and chose not to compete,” or even sometimes “Huh? We never heard about that deal.” That said, what I’m hearing is that Exadata is indeed a much stronger competitor than it used to be.
- Oracle claims a near $1 billion sales run rate for Exadata. No doubt, a large majority of those are hardware upgrades for existing Oracle database customers, often from non-Sun/Oracle hardware. Even so, some of those are surely deals that would have migrated away from Oracle in the pre-Exadata past.
| Categories: Aster Data, Data warehousing, Exadata, Market share, Oracle | 1 Comment |
Best practices for analytic DBMS POCs
When you are selecting an analytic DBMS or appliance, most of the evaluation boils down to two questions:
- How quickly and cost-effectively does it execute SQL?
- What analytic functionality, SQL or otherwise, does it do a good job of executing?
And so, in undertaking such a selection, you need to start by addressing three issues:
- What does “speed” mean to you?
- What does “cost” mean to you?
- What analytic functionality do you need anyway?
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehousing, Exadata, Netezza, ParAccel, Teradata | 5 Comments |
Various quick notes
As you might imagine, there are a lot of blog posts I’d like to write I never seem to get around to, or things I’d like to comment on that I don’t want to bother ever writing a full post about. In some cases I just tweet a comment or link and leave it at that.
And it’s not going to get any better. Next week = the oft-postponed elder care trip. Then I’m back for a short week. Then I’m off on my quarterly visit to the SF area. Soon thereafter I’ve have a lot to do in connection with Enzee Universe. And at that point another month will have gone by.
Anyhow: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, Exadata, GIS and geospatial, Google, IBM and DB2, Netezza, Oracle, Parallelization, SAP AG, SAS Institute | 3 Comments |
Thoughts on IBM’s anti-Oracle announcements
IBM is putting out a couple of press releases today that are obviously directed competitively at Oracle/Sun, and more specifically at Oracle’s Exadata-centric strategy. I haven’t been briefed, so I just have those to go on.
On the whole, the releases look pretty lame. Highlights seem to include:
- Maybe a claim of enhanced data compression.
- Otherwise, no obvious new technology except product packaging and bundling.
- Aggressive plans to throw capital at the Sun channel to convert it to selling IBM gear. (A figure of $1/2 billion is mentioned, for financing.
Disappointingly, IBM shows a lot of confusion between:
- Text data
- Machine-generated data such as that from sensors
While both highly important, those are very different things. IBM has not in the past shown much impressive technology in either of those two areas, and based on these releases, I presume that trend is continuing.
Edits:
I see from press coverage that at least one new IBM model has some Fusion I/O solid-state memory boards in it. Makes sense.
A Twitter hashtag has a number of observations from the event. Not much substance I could detect except various kind of Oracle bashing.
| Categories: Database compression, Exadata, IBM and DB2, Oracle, Solid-state memory | 14 Comments |
Notes on the evolution of OLTP database management systems
The past few years have seen a spate of startups in the analytic DBMS business. Netezza, Vertica, Greenplum, Aster Data and others are all reasonably prosperous, alongside older specialty product vendors Teradata and Sybase (the Sybase IQ part). OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) and general purpose DBMS startups, however, have not yet done as well, with such success as there has been (MySQL, Intersystems Cache’, solidDB’s exit, etc.) generally accruing to products that originated in the 20th Century.
Nonetheless, OLTP/general-purpose data management startup activity has recently picked up, targeting what I see as some very real opportunities and needs. So as a jumping-off point for further writing, I thought it might be interesting to collect a few observations about the market in one place. These include:
- Big-brand OLTP/general-purpose DBMS have more “stickiness” than analytic DBMS.
- By number, most of an enterprise’s OLTP/general-purpose databases are low-volume and low-value.
- Most interesting new OLTP/general-purpose data management products are either MySQL-based or NoSQL.
- It’s not yet clear whether MySQL will prevail over MySQL forks, or vice-versa, or whether they will co-exist.
- The era of silicon-centric relational DBMS is coming.
- The emphasis on scale-out and reducing the cost of joins spans the NoSQL and SQL-based worlds.
- Users’ instance on “free” could be a major problem for OLTP DBMS innovation.
I shall explain. Read more
Quick news, links, comments, etc.
Some notes based on what I’ve been reading recently: Read more
Some business trends in the data warehouse market
In recent conversations with various analytic DBMS vendors, a fairly consistent picture has emerged.
- Business is strong. Multiple vendors claim to be going gangbusters, with the happy sounds coming out of Vertica and Infobright being echoed by several competitors. Hearsay suggests some other companies in related businesses are doing well too. Depending on who you talk to, the business pickup dates back to Q4, give or take a quarter.
- Oracle Exadata has become a formidable competitor, on the strength of Exadata 2. Exadata 2’s positioning and perception among Oracle users seem to be pretty much in line with what Oracle portrayed to me.
- Teradata is portrayed as a weak competitor. Competitors don’t worry about Teradata nearly as much as they do about Oracle. That said, I suspect a bit of wishful thinking; Teradata is clearly still getting a lot of business the other vendors would dearly love to have.
- HP Neoview is reeling. (Almost) nobody sees Neoview competitively. The Walmart Neoview installation is said to have stayed small at best. JP Morgan Chase is said to have completely thrown Neoview out (and a bunch of HP engineers with it).
- (Almost) nobody mentions competing against DB2 either. This continues to baffle me.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Exadata, HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Market share, Oracle, Specific users, Teradata | 1 Comment |
Another reason to expect number-crunching and big-data management to converge
Dan Olds argues that Oracle is likely to pursue commercially-substantive high performance computing (HPC), emphasis mine: Read more