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
Oracle Database Machine and Exadata pricing: Part 2
My Oracle Database Machine and Exadata pricing spreadsheet has been updated. Specifically:
- The first page has been modestly altered to accommodate more chargeable software options, as per the discussion below.
- Accordingly, my new estimate for HP Oracle Database Machine list price is $5,546,000. Per-terabyte prices (user data) are $60K and $198K for the two configurations.
- There’s a whole new second page, for Exadata configurations smaller than a full Oracle Database Machine. Most of the work on that was done by Bence Arató of BI Consulting (Hungary), who graciously gave me permission to post it.
- The lowest per-terabyte Exadata price estimates are about 20% lower than for the full Oracle Database Machine. The difference is due mainly to eliminating Real Application Clusters for a single-node SMP machine, and secondarily to rounding down slightly on server hardware capacity. But these are rough estimates, as neither Bence nor I is a hardware pricing guy.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 11 Comments |
Eric Lai on Oracle Exadata, and some addenda
Eric Lai offers a detailed FAQ on Oracle Exadata, including a good selection of links and quotes. I’d like to offer a few comments in response: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing | 4 Comments |
Exadata and Oracle Database Machine parallelization clarified
Some kind Oracle development managers have reached out and helped me better understand where Oracle does or doesn’t stand in query and analytic parallelization. This post supersedes prior discussions of the subject over the past week. Read more
| Categories: Clustering, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Parallelization | 10 Comments |
Oracle Database Machine performance and compression
Greg Rahn was kind enough to recite in his blog what Oracle has disclosed about the first Exadata testers. I don’t track hardware model details, so I don’t know how the testers’ respective current hardware environments compare to that of the Oracle Database Machine.
Each of the customers cited below received “half” an Oracle Database Machine. As I previously noted, an Oracle Database Machine holds either 14.0 or 46.2 terabytes of uncompressed data. This suggests the 220 TB customer listed below — LGR Telecommunications — got compression of a little under 10:1 for a CDR (Call Detail Record) database. By comparison, Vertica claims 8:1 compression on CDRs.
Greg also writes of POS (Point Of Sale) data being used for the demo. If you do the arithmetic on the throughput figures (13.5 vs. a little over 3), compression was a little under 4.5:1. I don’t know what other vendors claim for POS compression.
Here are the details Greg posted about the four most open Oracle Database Machine tests: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Exadata, Oracle, Telecommunications | 9 Comments |
Oracle Exadata list pricing
The figures in this post have now been updated. There’s a new spreadsheet at that link as well.
I’ve been trying to figure out how much Oracle Exadata actually costs. My first cut comes up with prices of $58-190K/TB (user data), based on a total system price of $5,322,000, and user data figures of 28 and 92.4 TB for the two available sizes of disk drive. But of course there are a lot of uncertainties in these figures. You can use this spreadsheet (Edit: That’s the old one) to see where the final numbers come from, and to modify the estimates as you see fit. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 10 Comments |
Oracle Exadata Smart Scan Join Processing
Oracle has put up an Exadata white paper (hat tip to Kevin Closson’s Exadata FAQ). There’s a section on Smart Scan Join Processing. Sounds exciting, huh? It reads, in its entirety:
Exadata performs joins between large tables and small lookup tables, a very common scenario for data warehouses with star schemas. This is implemented using Bloom Filters, which are a very efficient probabilistic method to determine whether a row is a member of the desired result set.
Jeez. That almost sounds as if Exadata is an immature, Release 1 data warehouse appliance!
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle | 14 Comments |
So what does Oracle Exadata mean for HP Neoview?
That HP is committed to selling a lot of data warehouse hardware — and probably data warehouse appliances in particular — seems obvious, for reasons including:
- HP bought a big BI/data warehousing consulting operation in Knightsbridge.
- HP has put considerable effort into its data warehouse appliance Neoview.
- HP CEO Mark Hurd comes from data warehouse appliance vendor Teradata.
- Data warehousing where the big bucks are.
But Oracle Exadata could produce those appliance sales. So where does HP Neoview fit in?
I was told by an investor today that HP’s investor relations department is saying Oracle Exadata is a Netezza competitor, while Neoview is more in the Teradata market. That’s laughable. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, HP and Neoview, Netezza, Teradata | 16 Comments |
Other notes on Oracle data warehousing
Obviously, the big news this week is Exadata, and its parallelization or lack thereof. But let’s not forget the rest of Oracle’s data warehousing technology.
- Frankly, I’ve come to think that disk-based OLAP cubes and materialized views are both cop-outs, indicative of a relational data warehouse architecture that can’t answer queries quickly enough straight-up. But if you disagree, then you might like Oracle’s new OLAP cube materialized views, which sound like a worthy competitor to Microsoft Analysis Services. (Further confusing things, I’ve seen reports that Oracle is increasing its commitment to Essbase, a separate MOLAP engine. I hope those are incorrect.)
- A few weeks ago, I came to realize that Oracle’s data mining database features actually mattered — perhaps not quite as much as Charlie Berger might think, but to say that is to praise with faint damns. 😉 SPSS seems to be getting large performance gains from leveraging the scoring part, and perhaps the transformation part as well. I haven’t focused on getting my details right yet, so I haven’t been writing about it. But heck, with all the other Oracle data warehousing discussion, it seems right to at least mention this part too.
So what’s Oracle’s MPP-aware optimizer and query execution plan story?
Edit: Answers to the title question have now shown up, and so the post below is now superseded by this one.
In most respects — including most data warehousing respects — Oracle’s query optimizer is the most sophisticated on the planet (even ahead of IBM’s, I’d say). But in all the Exadata discussion — and also in a good, comprehensive review of Oracle’s data warehouse technology — I haven’t seen any claims that Oracle has tackled the hard problems of parallel analytics.
Yes, Oracle is now getting data off of multiple disks onto multiple processors at once, without SAN bottlenecks, and doing some local filtering. That’s the heart of the Exadata storage story, and it’s indeed a huge advance over Oracle’s prior technology. But what happens to the data after that? It’s sent over to a RAC cluster. And unless I’m terribly mistaken, any further processing will be done on just a single node in that cluster.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Oracle, Parallelization | 9 Comments |
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 | 5 Comments |