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
Some interesting links
In no particular order: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Fun stuff, Hadoop, Humor, In-memory DBMS, MapReduce, Memory-centric data management, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG | 2 Comments |
New insights into the GPL vs. MySQL storage engine debates
Around the time of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and hence MySQL, there was a lot of discussion as to whether MySQL’s GPL license could inhibit MySQL storage engine vendors from selling their products without MySQL code (e.g., with MySQL-fork front-ends). I argued No. Most people, however, seemed to think “Yes, and even if the matter isn’t clear, the threat of nasty lawyers creates enough FUD to be a practical market problem for the storage engine vendors.” Based on those concerns, I eventually took the position that Oracle should be inhibited for antitrust reasons from invoking its real or alleged GPL rights to mess with the MySQL storage engine vendors. Oracle’s agreement with the EU alleviated that concern, except that there was an annoying time limit on the alleviation.
Now a related can of worms has been opened in a related technology area — WordPress and WordPress themes. Since many bloggers use WordPress, this has gotten a lot of attention, and some interesting new insights have emerged. Read more
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, Oracle | 10 Comments |
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 its 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 and customer counts, Oracle | 1 Comment |
Netezza’s version of EnterpriseDB-based Oracle compatibility
EnterpriseDB has some deplorable business practices (my stories of being screwed by EnterpriseDB have been met by “Well, you’re hardly the only one”). But a couple of more successful DBMS vendors have happily partnered with EnterpriseDB even so, to help pick off Oracle users. IBM’s approach was in the vein of an EnterpriseDB–infused version of SQL handling within DB2.* Netezza just announced an EnterpriseDB-based Netezza Migrator that is rather different.
*The comment threads are the most informative parts of those posts.
I’m a little unclear as to the Netezza Migrator details, not least because Netezza folks don’t seem to care too much about Netezza Migrator themselves. That said, the core ideas of Netezza Migrator are: Read more
| Categories: Data integration and middleware, Data warehousing, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Netezza, Oracle | 19 Comments |
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 | 7 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 |
ITA Software and Needlebase
Rumors are flying that Google may acquire ITA Software. I know nothing of their validity, but I have known about ITA Software for a while. Random notes include:
- ITA Software builds huge OLTP systems that it runs itself on behalf of airlines.
- Very, very unusually, ITA Software builds these huge OLTP systems in LISP.
- ITA Software is an Oracle shop (see Dan Weinreb’s comment).
- ITA Software is run by a techie (again, see Dan Weinreb’s comment).
- ITA Software has an interesting screen-scraping/web ETL project called Needlebase
ITA’s software does both price/reservation lookup/checking and reservation-making. I’ve had trouble keeping it straight, but I think the lookup is ITA’s actual business, and the reservation-making is ITA’s Next Big Thing. This is one of the ultimate federated-transaction-processing applications, because it involves coordinating huge OLTP systems run, in some cases, by companies that are bitter competitors with each other. Network latencies have to allow for intercontinental travel of the data itself.
Indeed, airline reservation systems are pretty much the OLTP ultimate in themselves. As the story goes, transaction monitors were pretty much invented for airline reservation systems in the 1960s.
A really small project for ITA Software is Needlebase. I stopped by ITA to look at Needlebase in January, and what it is is a very smart and hence interesting screen-scraping system. The idea is people publish database information to the web, and you may want to look at their web pages and recover the database records it is based on. Applications of this to the airline industry, which has 100s of 1000s of price changes per day — and I may be too low by one or two orders of magnitude when I say that — should be fairly obvious. ITA Software has aspirations of applying Needlebase to other sectors as well, or more precisely having users who do so. Last I looked, ITA hadn’t put significant resources behind stimulating Needlebase adoption — but Google might well change that.
Edit: I just re-found an old characterization of (some of) what ITA Software does by — who else? — Dan Weinreb:
I am working on our new product, an airline reservation system. It’s an online transaction-processing system that must be up 99.99% of the time, maintaining maximum response time (e.g. on www.aircanada.com). It’s a very, very complicated system. The presentation layer is written in Java using conventional techniques. The business rule layer is written in Common Lisp; about 500,000 lines of code (plus another 100,000 or so of open source libraries). The database layer is Oracle RAC. We operate our own data centers, some here in Massachusetts and a disaster-recovery site in Canada (separate power grid).
Related links
- ITA Software and Needlebase websites
- More about LISP 🙂
| Categories: Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Google, OLTP, Oracle | 5 Comments |
Story of an analytic DBMS evaluation
One of our readers was kind enough to walk me through his analytic DBMS evaluation process. The story is:
- The X Company (XCo) has a <1 TB database.
- 100s of XCo’s customers log in at once to run reports. 50-200 concurrent queries is a good target number.
- XCo had been “suffering” with Oracle and wanted to upgrade.
- XCo didn’t have a lot of money to spend. Netezza pulled out of the sales cycle early due to budget (and this was recently enough that Netezza Skimmer could have been bid).
- Greenplum didn’t offer any references that approached the desired number of concurrent users.
- Ultimately the evaluation came down to Vertica and ParAccel.
- Vertica won.
Notes on the Vertica vs. ParAccel selection include: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Vertica Systems | 7 Comments |
Examples of machine-generated data
Not long ago I pointed out that much future Big Data growth will be in the area of machine-generated data, examples of which include: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Games and virtual worlds, Investment research and trading, Log analysis, Oracle, Telecommunications, Web analytics | 28 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 |