Exadata
Analysis of Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Database Machine. Related subjects include:
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 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 | Leave a 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
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
Comments on the Gartner 2009/2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant
At intervals of little over a year, Gartner Group publishes a Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant. Gartner’s 2009 data warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant — actually, January 2010 — is now out.* For many reasons, including those I noted in my comments on Gartner’s 2008 Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant, the Gartner quadrant pictures are a bad use of good research. Rather than rehash that this year, I’ll merely call out some points in the surrounding commentary that I find interesting or just plain strange. Read more
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:
- Oracle thinks flash memory is the most important hardware technology of the decade, one that could lead to Oracle being “bumped off” if they don’t get it right.
- Juan believes the “bulk” of Oracle’s business will move over to Exadata-like technology over the next 5-10 years. Numbers-wise, this seems to be based more on Exadata being a platform for consolidating an enterprise’s many Oracle databases than it is on Exadata running a few Especially Big Honking Database management tasks.
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
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:
- Teradata ascribes considerable importance to a Virtual Storage technology whose main purpose is to allow mixing of heterogeneous storage devices in a single system. And the discussion rarely suggests that these parts will be in a rigid fixed relationship.
- Netezza — as Teradata keeps reminding me — often sells boxes with the expectation that they won’t be filled with data, so as to increase spindle count and hence performance.
- Oracle/Sun have dropped some comments about Exadata being more flexibly configured going forward.
- Kickfire’s new “high-end” appliance lets you attach fairly arbitrary amounts of external storage.
- And of course, software-only analytic DBMS vendors run their software in all sorts of hardware and storage environments.
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.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Kickfire, Netezza, Oracle, Teradata | 6 Comments |
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
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Market share, Oracle, Teradata | 5 Comments |
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:
- If we believe Oracle’s claims of 10X compression, Exadata 2 costs more per terabyte of user data than Netezza TwinFin — $22-26K/TB vs. TwinFin’s <$20K — but less than the Teradata 2550.
- These figures are highly sensitive to assumptions about Oracle’s hybrid columnar compression.
- Similarly, if Netezza or Teradata were to significantly upgrade their own compression, the price comparison would look quite different.
- Options such as Data Mining or Oracle Spatial add 12% or so each to Exadata’s total system price.
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:
- Similar overall pricing
- Twice the disk capacity
- Better compression
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Exadata, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing, Teradata | 13 Comments |
Facts and rumors
- Vertica is putting out a press release today touting its 100th customer, and talking of triple digit growth last year.
- Multiple sources have told me that the DATAllegro system is being thrown out of Dell, so evidently Dell is telling this to one and all. If that goes through, this would presumably leave TEOCO as DATAllegro’s single happy customer. (I haven’t checked with Microsoft for its view.)
- A rumor has it that Infiniband technology vendor Voltaire, Ltd. privately claims triple-digit sales of switches for Exadata 1 (I think that one would be one switch per Exadata installation, not per rack). Based just on a quick glance, this is far from confirmed by Voltaire’s earnings conference call transcripts or SEC filings. However, the most recent transcript does seem to indicate Voltaire got multiple Exadata deals in the telecommunications sector, and suggests some Exadata penetration in other sectors as well.
- I was told of a classified-agency user that has >1 petabyte of data on Exadata 1 and 600 terabytes or so on Netezza. My not-obviously-biased source says the agency is distinctly happier with Netezza than Exadata.
- Like ParAccel, Oracle just got dinged for TPC-related misbehavior.
- Rumor has it that Sun has no intention of helping ParAccel rerun its withdrawn TPC-H benchmark.
- ParAccel has withdrawn the claim from its home page to be the “CERTIFIED” price-performance leader. This seems to confirm that the claim was a reference to the TPC-H. In my opinion, that was a gross misrepresentation of what the TPC-H shows.
Thoughts on the integration of OLTP and data warehousing, especially in Exadata 2
Oracle is pushing Exadata 2 as being a great system for any of OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing), data warehousing or, presumably, the integration of same. This claim rests on a few premises, namely: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, OLTP, Oracle, Solid-state memory, Theory and architecture | 35 Comments |
The hunt for Oracle Exadata production references
Over the past four weeks, I’ve given speeches in Boston, DC, Milan, London, and SF,* attended a conference in Lyon, done a fair amount of consulting, and taken a few non-client briefings as well. That’s why I haven’t had much of a chance to sit down, analyze the tea leaves, and write about Exadata 2. (Small exception: Highlights from and remarks on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 white paper.) I hope to do that soon.
*I’ll bop over to Chicago for the last of the series early next week.
But first — can anybody identify much in the way of Exadata production references? Oracle recently talked of a few flagship data warehouse customers, but those don’t seem to be running Exadata. I talked recently with an Oracle prospect from the US, who only got one reference from Oracle — in Eastern Europe. (Well, two references, if you also count the system integrator on the same deal.)
So far as I can tell, Oracle Exadata production sites are pretty scarce on the ground. What, if anything, am I missing?