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 of Oracle’s largest data warehouses
Googling around, I came across an Oracle presentation – given some time this year – that lists some of Oracle’s largest data warehouses. 10 databases total are listed with >16 TB, which is fairly consistent with Larry Ellison’s confession during the Exadata announcement that Oracle has trouble over 10 TB (which is something I’ve gotten a lot of flack from a few Oracle partisans for pointing out … 😀 ).
However, what’s being measured is probably not the same in all cases. For example, I think the Amazon 70 TB figure is obviously for spinning disk (elsewhere in the presentation it’s stated that Amazon has 71 TB of disk). But the 16 TB British Telecom figure probably is user data — indeed, it’s the same figure Computergram cited for BT user data way back in 2001.
The list is: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Oracle, Specific users, Telecommunications, Yahoo | 6 Comments |
Exadata: Oracle finally answers the data warehouse challengers
Oracle, in partnership with HP, has announced a new data warehouse appliance product line, cleverly branded “Exadata.” The basic idea seems to be that database processing is split among two sets of servers:
- (The new stuff) A set of back-end servers — the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers — that gets data off of disk and does some preliminary query processing.
- (The old stuff) A conventional Oracle RAC cluster on the front-end.
Numbers are being thrown around suggesting that, unlike prior Oracle offerings, the Oracle Exadata-based appliance at least has scalability and price/performance worth comparing to Teradata — hey, Exa is bigger than Tera! — Netezza, et al.
Kevin Closson, who evidently worked on the project, offers the most useful and detailed description of Oracle Exadata I’ve seen so far. In particular, he and Oracle seem to claim: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Parallelization | 18 Comments |
Oracle is integrating clickstream and network analytics too
Oracle announced today the not-so-concisely-named Oracle Real User Experience Insight, which actually seems to be an official nickname for what is more properly called “Oracle Enterprise Manager Real User Experience Insight.” Trying saying that 10 times straight at network speeds … but I digress.
If I’m reading things correctly, add Oracle to the already long list of vendors who see clickstream and network event analytics as being two sides of the same coin.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Oracle, Web analytics | 2 Comments |
A few operational BI/BPM/business rules stories
Intersystems is rolling out DeepSee, which is a Cache’-specific BI engine. Since some Intersystems OEMs have been known to pay more money to Business Objects/Crystal Reports than to Intersystems itself, the business motivation is obvious. Technically, Intersystems’ claims include: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Intersystems and Cache', Oracle | 1 Comment |
Oracle spotlights its datatype support
Oracle put out a flurry of press releases today in conjunction with Oracle OpenWorld. One, which was simply positioned as a report on some “mission-critical” customer apps, caught my eye because all four detailed examples involved nonstandard datatypes:
- Two Oracle Spatial
- One “semantic,” which in Oracle lingo seems to mean — you guessed it — RDF
- One DICOM, which seems to be a medical imaging datatype.
| Categories: Data types, GIS and geospatial, Oracle, RDF and graphs | 3 Comments |
The essence of the Oracle Amazon cloud offering
OK. The press release adds color to what I previously posted about Oracle’s new Amazon cloud offering. Read more
| Categories: Cloud computing, Oracle | Leave a Comment |
Oracle announces an Amazon cloud offering
Per the Amazon Web Service Blog, Oracle announced that Oracle can be run in the Amazon cloud (i.e., on EC2, with EBS for persistent storage). Clustering is probably weak, however — e.g., there’s no RAC support, as per Oracle’s well-written FAQ. Perhaps not coincidentally, the FAQ seems to suggest that the primary use case at this time is for backup, and backup is generally a major point of emphasis on Oracle’s cloud computing page.
Of course, another use case could be development, but that depends in part on pricing. Of course, whether Oracle’s offering seems attractively priced compared with, for example, a similar one from EnterpriseDB and Elastra depends a lot on whether you’ve already negotiated an unlimited-use license for Oracle.
James Kobielus, who presumably was pre-briefed, has more to say.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Oracle | 1 Comment |
More Oracle announcement speculation
Like many other folks, Chris Mellor took a go at speculating about Oracle’s announcements this week. Some of his points are sloppy — e.g., he thinks compression necessarily requires hardware assistance — but he did make one interesting observation: Tea leaves suggest HP has a prominent role in something Oracle is announcing. But then, if you’ve been reading along, you already suspected that.
| Categories: Oracle | Leave a Comment |
Oracle announcements next week, data warehouse appliance, 11g R2 or otherwise
Eric Lai and Chris Kanarcus put up an article on Oracle’s announcements next week. Much of the speculation revolved around generic grid/clustering, with more detail than I posted yesterday. Most interesting to me was the last section of the article, which sounds as if it could be talking about the same thing Luke Lonergan referred to in a comment thread when he said:
Oracle is about to unveil a secret project that uses HP DL185 servers as storage devices with some predicate pushdowns to implement a data warehouse “appliance”.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Oracle | 1 Comment |
More mysteries regarding Oracle CDR load speed
Last spring, DATAllegro user John Devolites of TEOCO told me of troubles his firm had had loading CDRs (Call Detail Records) into Oracle, and how those had been instrumental in his eventual adoption of DATAllegro. That claim was contemptously challenged in a couple of comment threads.
Well, tonight at the Netezza user conference, Netezza gave awards to its first customers. The very first to accept was Jim Hayden, who’d bought Netezza for a company called Vibrant Solutions, which coincidentally was later acquired by TEOCO itself. In front of hundreds of people, he talked about how, back in 2003, it had taken 23 hours to load 400 million CDRs into Oracle on Nextel’s behalf, but only 40 minutes on Netezza.
And I’ll erase the rest of what I’d drafted here, as it was dripping in sarcasm …
| Categories: Data warehousing, Netezza, Oracle, Telecommunications, TEOCO | 2 Comments |