Oracle

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

November 29, 2012

Notes on Microsoft SQL Server

I’ve been known to gripe that covering big companies such as Microsoft is hard. Still, Doug Leland of Microsoft’s SQL Server team checked in for phone calls in August and again today, and I think I got enough to be worth writing about, albeit at a survey level only,

Subjects I’ll mention include:

One topic I can’t yet comment about is MOLAP/ROLAP, which is a pity; if anybody can refute my claim that ROLAP trumps MOLAP, it’s either Microsoft or Oracle.

Microsoft’s slides mentioned Yahoo refining a 6 petabyte Hadoop cluster into a 24 terabyte SQL Server “cube”, which was surprising in light of Yahoo’s history as an Oracle reference.

Read more

October 11, 2012

Oracle and IBM — strategic context

By my standards, I’ve been writing a lot about Oracle and IBM recently. Let me now step back and review the context in which I view them.

At the highest level, Oracle and IBM have similar strategic priorities, in line with the Innovator’s Dilemma/Innovator’s Solution issues I keep mentioning. That is:

Of course, there are major differences in the two companies’ product and service portfolios. Some of the biggest are: Read more

October 6, 2012

Analyzing big companies is hard

Analyzing companies of any size is hard. Analyzing large ones, however, is harder yet.

Such limitations should be borne in mind in connection with anything I write about, for example, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, or SAP.

There are many reasons for large companies to communicate less usefully with analysts than smaller ones do. Some of the biggest are:

Read more

October 4, 2012

That multi-tenancy discussion revisited

Keeping in mind Monash’s Third Law of Commercial Semantics,

No market categorization is ever precise

I’ll try to clarify my response to Oracle’s claims about Oracle12c being a “multi-tenant” DBMS.

I wrote a couple days ago:

Oracle is confusing people with its comments on multi-tenancy. I suspect:

  • What Oracle is talking about when it says “multi-tenancy” is more like consolidation than true multi-tenancy.
  • Probably there are a couple of true multi-tenancy features as well.

Now I’m even having doubts about the second part.

In simplest terms:

But from everything I’ve heard:

More detail may be found at the links above.

October 1, 2012

Notes on the Oracle OpenWorld Sunday keynote

I’m not at Oracle OpenWorld, but as usual that won’t keep me from commenting. My bottom line on the first night’s announcements is:

In particular:

1. At the highest level, my view of Oracle’s strategy is the same as it’s been for several years:

Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution teaches us that Oracle should focus on selling a thick stack of technology to its highest-end customers, and that’s exactly what Oracle does focus on.

2. Tonight’s news is closely in line with what Oracle’s Juan Loaiza told me three years ago, especially:

  • 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.

3. Oracle is confusing people with its comments on multi-tenancy. I suspect:

4. SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors don’t want to use Oracle, because they don’t want to pay for it.* This limits the potential impact of Oracle’s true multi-tenancy features. Even so: Read more

September 27, 2012

Hoping for true columnar storage in Oracle12c

I was asked to clarify one of my July comments on Oracle12c,

I wonder whether Oracle will finally introduce a true columnar storage option, a year behind Teradata. That would be the obvious enhancement on the data warehousing side, if they can pull it off. If they can’t, it’s a damning commentary on the core Oracle codebase.

by somebody smart who however seemed to have half-forgotten my post comparing (hybrid) columnar compression to (hybrid) columnar storage.

In simplest terms:

September 21, 2012

Database challenges in multi-tenancy support

I predicted 2 months ago that Oracle 12c would have some kind of improved support for multi-tenancy; Larry Ellison confirmed on this week’s earnings call that it will. So maybe it’s time to think about what such support could or should mean. I’m actually still on vacation, so I’d like to keep this short, but here are a few notes.

September 7, 2012

Integrated internet system design

What are the central challenges in internet system design? We probably all have similar lists, comprising issues such as scale, scale-out, throughput, availability, security, programming ease, UI, or general cost-effectiveness. Screw those up, and you don’t have an internet business.

Much new technology addresses those challenges, with considerable success. But the success is usually one silo at a time — a short-request application here, an analytic database there. When it comes to integration, unsolved problems abound.

The top integration and integration-like challenges for me, from a practical standpoint, are:

Other concerns that get mentioned include:

Let’s skip those latter issues for now, focusing instead on the first four.

Read more

August 19, 2012

Data warehouse appliance — analytic glossary draft entry

This is a draft entry for the DBMS2 analytic glossary. Please comment with any ideas you have for its improvement!

Note: Words and phrases in italics will be linked to other entries when the glossary is complete.

A data warehouse appliance is a combination of hardware and software that includes an analytic DBMS (DataBase Management System). However, some observers incorrectly apply the term “data warehouse appliance” to any analytic DBMS.

The paradigmatic vendors of data warehouse appliances are:

Further, vendors of analytic DBMS commonly offer — directly or through partnerships — optional data warehouse appliance configurations; examples include:

Oracle Exadata is sometimes regarded as a data warehouse appliance as well, despite not being solely focused on analytic use cases.

Data warehouse appliances inherit marketing claims from the category of analytic DBMS, such as: Read more

August 7, 2012

Notes on some basic database terminology

In a call Monday with a prominent company, I was told:

That, to put it mildly, is not accurate. So I shall try, yet again, to set the record straight.

In an industry where people often call a DBMS just a “database” — so that a database is something that manages a database! — one may wonder why I bother. Anyhow …

1. The products commonly known as Oracle, Exadata, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server, Teradata, Sybase IQ, Netezza, Vertica, Greenplum, Aster, Infobright, SAND, ParAccel, Exasol, Kognitio et al. all either are or incorporate relational database management systems, aka RDBMS or relational DBMS.

2. In principle, there can be difficulties in judging whether or not a DBMS is “relational”. In practice, those difficulties don’t arise — yet. Every significant DBMS still falls into one of two categories:

*I expect the distinction to get more confusing soon, at which point I’ll adopt terms more precise than “relational things” and “relational stuff”.

3. There are two chief kinds of relational DBMS: Read more

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