July 25, 2012
Thoughts on the next releases of Oracle and Exadata
A reporter asked me to speculate about the next releases of Oracle and Exadata. He and I agreed:
- It seems likely that they’ll be discussed at Oracle OpenWorld in a couple of months.
- Exadata in particular is due for a hardware refresh.
- Oracle12c is a good guess at a name, where “C” is for “Cloud”.
My answers mixed together thoughts on what Oracle should and will emphasize (which aren’t the same thing but hopefully bear some relationship to each other ;)). They were (lightly edited):
- The worst thing about Oracle is the ongoing DBA work for what should be automatic.
- Oracle RAC still makes scale-out too difficult. Presumably, Oracle is looking to build aggressively on recent steps in automating parallelism.
- For Exadata, assume that Oracle is always looking to improve how data gets allocated among disk, flash, and RAM. Look also for Exadata versions with different silicon-disk ratios than are available now.
- Tighter integration among the various appliances is surely a goal, …
- … but I don’t know whether Oracle will pick them apart and let you put various kinds of hardware in the same racks or not. I’d guess against that, because the current set-up gives them a pretext to sell you more capacity than you need.
- I wonder whether Oracle will finally introduce a true columnar storage option, a year behind Teradata. That would be the obvious enhancement on the data warehousing side, if they can pull it off. If they can’t, it’s a damning commentary on the core Oracle codebase.
- Probably Oracle will have something that it portrays as good multi-tenancy support. Some of that could be based on Label Security and so on.
- Anything that makes schema change easier could be a win on the DBA and multi-tenancy sides alike, which would be a nice two-fer.
Categories: Clustering, Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Teradata
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7 Responses to “Thoughts on the next releases of Oracle and Exadata”
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Question asked: why You need Exadata while there is an Big Data appliance, with os db system ? This bumps from time to time on Oracle’s internal meetings when Management pushs sales of Exa.
I imagine it would depend on the use case.
On the “Anything that makes schema change easier” front – Oracle did a lot of work on this in the 11 & 11.2 releases. A number of the DDL operations were changed to have significantly less impact (in many cases no impact) on the other operations happening on the system. 11.2 also introduced Edition Based Redefinition which allows end users to script complex transformations with little to no impact on running applications
Mmm. Adding nodes to RAC is pretty easy. Not sure how it could be easier actually. In fact what do you mean by ‘ongoing DBA work’? Oracle is a lot easier, with less to do, than other DBMSs I have worked with such as db2 or SQL. Also what do you mean by ‘tighter integration’? Again, I cant see how they’d be tighter than they already are. For columnar – what would be the improvement over what is there today? It already outperforms teradata by some margin from what my company has seen, and the compression works very well. Not sure how well informed this article is…..:-)
George,
Is it your opinion that Oracle should stop investing in R&D, because all possible improvements have already been made?
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