Mean machine
When's a good time to start job-related blogging? I've been with Oracle fornot even two years now and it takes a while before you're up-to-speed with the company's products, the company's culture. Oracle Openworld looked like an ideal timing as we have a tendency to announce a couple of things.
I have no specialisation, so I knew my blog would never be as specific nor detailed as some others. So I had a look at what my strong points are... architecture, ITIL, system management. So this'll be a blog that will have a look at the different technologies Oracle offers, just a bit from different angle sometimes (I hope!).
This year's Database Machine was a slightly controversial announcements with Netapp as a gold sponsor of the event. A lot of excitement in the audience, but equally frustrations from a minority who left the audience.
The HP/Oracle Database machine: musings ;-)
First of all, the machine is not only mean, but green. The limitation of spindles on all disks that will be obtained by the intelligence on the storage will greatly reduce power consumption as this will outweigh the extra cpu we put on the storage. So Oracle scores on the green front (not mentioned by Larry I believe) on an event where a lot of attention was already paid to green initiatives: the reduced book, the recycling, the sessions at Yerba Buena Gardens.
Secondly: performance! It's extremely fast for datawarehousing and although Larry, in his enthousiasm, said that it can be used for OLTP we got a clear message from product management that the design was for datawarehousing. So if you want to use it for OLTP, it will probably be faster, but the question remains whether this is cost-effective. If anyone has an ROI model on this, do not hesitate to comment ;-)
Scalability
And maybe this should have been mentioned upfront, there's linear scalability by adding storage. By moving processing power and intelligence to the hardware, this means adding speed. So what about the bandwith? Well, by adding the cells (as the individual components are called), you just add bandwith... so linear. And tests have proven this!
Ease of management.
Well, I must say, that was one of my worries. If you push software towards the hardware stack, multiple times, then you're asking for trouble if you're not careful. But also on this front, the engineers were one step ahead. Each unit is independant, and although it will not be advised to have multiple versions of the Oracle Exadata software in connected cells, multiple versions càn run next to each other. So no downtime required for upgrades and no big bang approaches here.
Did I tell you that management will be included in Oracle Enterprise Manager? I guess you'd figured that one out by yourself by now, not?
Enterprise ready
Especially with the full Database Machine, you get the advantages of an appliance but with all the goodies mentioned above and a database engine that has proven its merits.
