I’ve been getting quite a few emails from folks asking why I haven’t been posting content about Sun Oracle Database Machine. One such reader asked:
You guys must not actually have any real proof of this stuff or else you would be blogging for sure
I’m up to my neck in Sun Oracle Database Machine testing and performance characterization. Keeping several of these high-end beasts busy under my intense scrutiny is a good piece of work. That’s exactly why I haven’t been sticking my head up out of the foxhole and blogging.
While I have a lot of material I could blog about I thought it would be proper for everyone to get the official story in the form of Oracle white papers and the many slides to be shown by executives and upper management at OpenWorld 2009 before I started in with my incoherent ramblings and trivial pursuit. One such white paper can be found at the following URL:
A Technical Overview of the Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server and Database Machine
Some readers have been asking me to produce Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server FAQ-style posts in the same manner I did for the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server and HP Oracle Database Machine. I have a stack of those ready to go but need time to put them out.
Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage 
Thanks Kevin for your blog post, there is also a Webcast on Sun Oracle Database Machine on Sep 30, 2009, details as below:
https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/cmn_jm_hub.uix?mID=158101510
Sun Oracle Database Machine for Data Warehousing
Jean Pierre Dijcks – Data Warehousing Product Mgmt, Oracle
On September 15 Oracle announced the second generation of its Database Machine, making an already strong data warehousing product significantly stronger. The new version runs on Sun hardware and offers important new features. Available in full rack, half rack, quarter rack, and basic unit configurations, the Sun Oracle Database Machine can add value at many data warehouse size levels.
The Sun Oracle Database Machine runs on Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and has new features such as:
Smart Flash Cache memory for ultra-fast IO – Reaches 50GB/second on a full rack system (not even counting gains from compression)
Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression – Maximizes data capacity and reduces scan times: think 500GB/second IO
Offloaded Data Mining Scoring – Moves CPU-intensive operations from database servers to Exadata storage servers
In-Memory Parallel Execution – Caches full tables in memory across nodes: foundation of new TPC-H world record
There is plenty more we have not listed above, so come to this TechCast and learn about this major new product!
Audio Dial-In: 888 967 2253 Audio Meeting ID: 572994 Audio Meeting Passcode: 334451
Web Conference: https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/cmn_jm_hub.uix?mID=158101510
Compatibility Check: If you have not used Oracle’s web conference system before, please ensure your system compatibility by going to https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/nuf_sys.uix.
Ah, now I see what happens when I ignore your requests to deliver webcasts, Shyam 🙂 Maybe JP will ask me to come on for Q&A?
Readers, please note that I will be putting out a series of video webcasts as I did with Exadata V1 “Deep Dive” Series. I simply could not get anything done in the time frame Shyam was asking for. I have too much hands-on work with the product at the moment.
Oh, hold it. I can’t do the 30th. I’ll be at 7,000ft elevation hunting western Mule Deer. Guess which I’d rather be doing.
That’s a nice summary. Very interesting feature set.
However …
Am I alone in thinking that the quality of the writing in that white paper verges on the dreadful?
“Businesses today increasingly needs to leverage a unified database platform to enable the deployment and consolidation of all their applications onto one common infrastructure. Whether OLTP, DW or mixed workload a common infrastructure delivers the efficences and reusability the datacenter needs – and provides the reality of cloud computing in-house.”
Sweet mercy … someone run a spell and grammar checker over that, and it would not hurt to just get someone competent to check it for readability. Painful stuff.
Hi David,
As long as the paper conveys the product capabilities accurately I am happy at this stage of the game.
Kevin, let us know some estimated dates for the Deep Dive series on Exadata 2 (after OOW) and we can start letting the users know.
Thanks
Shyam
Thanks for the link to this paper.
v1 was targeting DW applications. I keep reading v2 will be also interesting for OLTP applications. I hope that after OW you will be able to comment further on the OLTP capabilities of the solution.
IMO, the hardware of the database server boxes (i.e. x4170) is too light in CPU power in the context of large OLTP applications. Even if you have several of them, RAC does not always scale very well in this context. We routinely run RAC on 64 Itanium cores nodes for some large applications. It cannot be compared to a pair of Nehalem CPUs. I wish Oracle offered more hardware options (4 or 8 sockets, 6 cores CPUs, etc …) for the database server nodes.
Regards,
Didier.
Hello Didier,
I will do my best after OW.