Oracle
Analysis of software titan Oracle and its efforts in database management, analytics, and middleware. Related subjects include:
- Oracle TimesTen
- (in The Monash Report)Operational and strategic issues for Oracle
- (in Software Memories) Historical notes on Oracle
- Most of what’s written about in this blog
Notes on data warehouse appliance prices
I’m not terribly motivated to do a detailed analysis of data warehouse appliance list prices, in part because:
- Everybody knows that in practice data warehouse appliances tend to be deeply discounted from list price.
- The only realistic metric to use for pricing data warehouse appliances is price-per-terabyte, and people have gotten pretty sick of that one.
That said, here are some notes on data warehouse appliance prices. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, EMC, Exadata, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing | 8 Comments |
Notes on the EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance
The big confidential part of my visit last week to EMC’s Data Computing Division, nee’ Greenplum, was of course this week’s announcement of the first EMC/Greenplum “Data Computing Appliance.” Basics include: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, EMC, Exadata, Greenplum, Oracle, Parallelization, Storage | 1 Comment |
Ray Lane at HP
Leo Apotheker is taking over as CEO of HP, and Ray Lane as chairman. I don’t know Leo, but I did talk a lot with Ray when he was at Oracle in the 1990s. Quick observations include: Read more
| Categories: HP and Neoview, Oracle, Vertica Systems | 9 Comments |
Further thoughts on previous posts
One thing I love about DBMS 2 is the really smart comments a number of readers — that would be you guys — make. However, not all the smart comments are made in the first 5 minutes a post is up, so some readers (unless you circle back) might miss great points other readers make. Well, here are some pointers to some of what you might have missed, along with other follow-up comments to old posts while I’m at it. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Calpont, IBM and DB2, Netezza, Oracle, SAS Institute | Leave a Comment |
A little more on the JPMorgan Chase Oracle outage
Jaikumar Vijayan of Computerworld did a story based on my reporting on the JP Morgan Chase Oracle outage. He did a good job, getting me to simplify some of what I said before. 🙂 He also added a quote from Chase to the effect:
the “long recovery process” was caused by a corruption of systems data that disabled the bank’s “ability to process customer log-ins to chase.com”
While that’s true, and indeed is the reason I first referred to this as an “authentication” problem, I believe it to be incomplete. For example, the $132 million in missed ACH payments weren’t directly driven by log-ins; they were to be done on schedule, perhaps based on previous log-ins. Or as Jai and I put it in the guts of his story: Read more
| Categories: JPMorgan Chase, Oracle | 6 Comments |
Some thoughts on the announcement that IBM is buying Netezza
As you’ve probably read, IBM and Netezza announced a deal today for IBM to buy Netezza. I didn’t sit in on the conference call, but I’ve seen the reporting. Naturally, I have some quick thoughts, which I’ve broken up into several sections below:
- Clearing some underbrush.
- Speculation about what IBM/Netezza will do.
- Speculation about alternative acquirers for Netezza.
- Speculation about what IBM/Netezza competitors will do.
Details of the JPMorgan Chase Oracle database outage
After posting my speculation about the JPMorgan Chase database outage, I was contacted by – well, by somebody who wants to be referred to as “a credible source close to the situation.” We chatted for a long time; I think it is very likely that this person is indeed what s/he claims to be; and I am honoring his/her requests to obfuscate many identifying details. However, I need a shorter phrase than “a credible source close to the situation,” so I’ll refer to him/her as “Deep Packet.”
According to Deep Packet,
- The JPMorgan Chase database outage was caused by corruption in an Oracle database.
- This Oracle database stored user profiles, which are more than just authentication data.
- Applications that went down include but may not be limited to:
- The main JPMorgan Chase portal.
- JPMorgan Chase’s ability to use the ACH (Automated Clearing House).
- Loan applications.
- Private client trading portfolio access.
- The Oracle database was back up by 1:12 Wednesday morning. But on Wednesday a second problem occurred, namely an overwhelming number of web requests. This turned out to be a cascade of retries in the face of – and of course exacerbating – poor response time. While there was no direct connection to the database outage, Deep Packet is sympathetic to my suggestions that:
- Network/app server traffic was bound to be particularly high as people tried to get caught up after the Tuesday outage, or just see what was going on in their accounts.
- Given that Deep Packet said there was a definite operator-error contributing cause, perhaps the error would not have happened if people weren’t so exhausted from dealing with the database outage.
Deep Packet stressed the opinion that the Oracle outage was not the fault of JPMorgan Chase (the Wednesday slowdown is a different matter), and rather can be blamed on an Oracle bug. Read more
| Categories: JPMorgan Chase, OLTP, Oracle | 41 Comments |
Soundbites about Mark Hurd joining Oracle
I’m on “vacation”, so I don’t know how timely I’ll be in getting back to reporters with quotes on Mark Hurd’s new job at Oracle. I put “vacation” in quotes because my father has been in a coma for over a week back in Ohio; I’m getting stonewalled for information about his and especially about my senile mother’s condition (while there’s a support structure making sure nothing too ridiculous happens, the whole thing has been even harder to block out for a while than if a full set of medical ethics were being used); Linda arrived here with an injury that has largely wrecked the vacation for her (if we had confidence in the local doctors we’d be seeing them for sure, and may yet see them anyway); and the mix of lesser factors is otherwise normal — great place, I took way too much work with me and had clients demanding more, connectivity was deplorable and is still unreliable (this post has been spread out over several hours by yet another connectivity outage), and weather has been a pleasant surprise to date (but clearly I’m benefiting from it a lot less than usual).
My thoughts on Mark Hurd (who I’ve never met) joining Oracle include:
- Mark Hurd is one of the least successful leaders in the modern history of the DBMS industry.
- Mark Hurd presided over Teradata while Teradata allowed a bunch of smaller competitors to grow up.
- Mark Hurd was said to be the prime mover behind HP Neoview, which has been an epic failure.
- Mark Hurd was in charge of HP when HP lost the Exadata business to Sun, and it’s not clear that the loss was just because Oracle bought Sun.
- Mark Hurd seems to have done poorly running services businesses at HP as well, at least in terms of their reputations.
- None of this means that Mark Hurd can’t do a good job on the volume-hardware side of Oracle. Nor does it seem likely that Hurd would get the power to gut Oracle’s R&D the way he is reputed to have gutted HP’s. And by the way, the investment in the HP Neoview fiasco shows that Hurd didn’t COMPLETELY gut R&D at HP either.
- The Mark Hurd hire is a signal that Oracle is very serious about hardware/software integration. Notwithstanding any of the foregoing, Hurd can surely talk the hardware/software integration game. And one can reasonably spin Hurd’s HP Neoview failure as a high-desire, low-odds attempt to get into the database software/hardware stack business.
- The time to assess whether Oracle will continue with the hardware/software integration emphasis will be when Mark Hurd leaves. Just as Ray Lane’s departure coincided with a reversal of the software/services integration strategy he so successfully championed, Hurd’s eventual departure could signal a backing off from emphasizing a software/hardware stack.
- Mark Hurd’s sexual harassment problems sound similar to Al Gore’s:
- He got services of the sort that are often a euphemism (massage in Gore’s case, escort in Hurd’s).
- The provider(s) just wanted to provide the real thing, not the euphemistic part as well.
- Unpleasantness ensued.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Exadata, HP and Neoview, Oracle, Teradata | 12 Comments |
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
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Calpont, Cassandra, Couchbase, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Exadata, Facebook, Greenplum, HP and Neoview, Kickfire, NoSQL, OLTP, ParAccel, Sybase, XtremeData | 1 Comment |
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