September 24, 2008
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 Edit: This point is superseded by my updated take on Oracle query parallelization.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
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5 Responses to “Oracle Exadata and Oracle data warehouse appliance sound bites”
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FYI – The quoted comment was about sharded databases and their applicability to running business applications. It had nothing to do with an earlier discussion on Oracle’s support for shared nothing.
Mark,
Thank you for the clarification.
What is this “speed of light” problem you were referring to that applies to sharded databases but not to shared-nothing analytic database management?
And if that’s not your objection to shared-nothing analytic database management, then what — if anything — is? (You were quoted as having strong objection to same, but that quote was inaccurate, then I apologize for taking it literally. I’ve certainly been misquoted often enough … 🙁 )
Best,
CAM
There are a few.
Most of the people I talk to with big sharded environments have had huge problems getting any sort of aggregation across the shards working correctly.
Timely replication of shared data to the individual shards can also be a huge issue.
Any architecture has it’s pros and cons. Normally the types of applications that work well in a sharded environment are ones that avoid the need for either of the above.
Unfortunately, many of the industry on-lookers (press etc) assume that any example of a successful architecture solving a given problem implies that that is the only possible solution for that problem. The reality is is that there are many ways to skin a cat.
[…] Автор: Curt Monash Дата публикации оригинала – 2008-09-24 Перевод: Константин Лисянский Источник: Блог Курта Монаша […]
[…] o Oracle Exadata vai eliminar a Teradata,Netezza ou Greenplum,” escreveu o analista Curt Monash. “Em médio para longoprazo, a estratégia técnica do Exadata pode funcionar muito bem. A […]