Oracle Exadata posts #1 TCP-H result

Grag Rahn's Structured Data blog provides the data that Kevin Closson had to remove from his own blog. From an HP/Oracle point of view, a very good performance, reducing cost/QphH by a factor of 4.

However, it is interesting to see that the HP/Oracle solution is still more than 4 times the cost/QphH of the #2 placed Exasol solution (running on Fujitsu Primergy, and reported a year ago) - while the absolute performance improvement is relatively slight (1.16M queries/hr against 1.02M).

Exadata and the Database Machine - the Oracle "kilopod"

There has already been plenty of interesting posts about Oracle Exadata - notably of course from Kevin Closson here and here (update: and this analysis from Christo Kutrovsky)- but I just have one thing to say.

Larry Ellison was quoted in a number of reports saying the Oracle Database Machine "is 1,400 times larger than Apple’s largest iPod".

Larry, when you want to get over that something is big - really big that is, industrial scale even - just don't compare it with a (however wonderful) consumer toy. Not even with 1,400 of them. 1.4 kilopods is so not a useful measure.

By the way, can I trademark the word kilopod please? (presumably not - a quick google found a 2005 article using the same word, and there is some kind of science-in-society blog at kilopod.com).

Microsoft acquires DATAllegro

Lots of interesting posts on this news, from:

• Curt Monash's DBMS2 blog - all his DATAllegro links are here - as there are so many of them. He also links to other comments
  
• Philip Howard at Bloor and IT-Director suggests that MS is assembling an entire DW stack with Zoomix and perhaps one day Kalido and Ab Initio as additional components
• Mark Madsen from Intelligent Enterprise says what it means for customers, other vendors and BI
  
• Kevin Closson with his welcome plain-speaking (and Oracle-centric) viewpoint refers back to earlier posts wondering about some specific details of this emperor's clothes
  
• Seth Grimes thinks it's a mistake that will be slow to deliver (and may hurt existing DATAllegro customers); it should have been Dataupia
• DATAllegro CEO Stuart Frost sounds happy with his new role
  

Meanwhile Seth Grimes also uses the news to point up a real difference in quality between Google and Microsoft search capabilities.

Active Metadata

Yesterday I moaned about poor use of metadata. Today I'd like to point to an example of the way metadata can be used actively. Andy Hayler describes Kalido's Business Information Modeller, which allows you actively to control and when necessary reshape the data warehouse by changing metadata; you can generate a BO universe, or deploy metadata to Cognos BI tools (more to come, apparently). You can (apparently) even undo the metadata changes, and see your warehouse as it would have been; kind of like Oracle's flashback recovery, but for data warehouse structures.

See Kalido's podcast, screenshots and other resources.

DATAllegro, DW appliances and the Oracle lock-in effect

Andy Hayler has an interesting post on DATAllegro - talking about its sweet spot at the very high end of data volumes; apparently helped by a grid with up to 1TB/minute transfer speeds.

What caught my eye was Andy's observation that "Oracle customers can be a harder sell (than Teradata's, for example) not because of the technology, but because of the weight of stored procedures and triggers ... in Oracle's proprietary extension" (ie PL/SQL).

Just looking at the various technologies people talk about on OraNA blogs, I wonder whether the continuing growth in Java and .NET based applications over the last decade - where many of the business rules are executed outside the database - might hurt Oracle precisely by removing the PL/SQL "stickiness" Andy describes.

Admittedly Apex is a counter example - thoroughly PL/SQL, thoroughly Oracle; no chance of moving Apex clients to another RDBMS yet. And the tendency to provide management interfaces through PL/SQL (or very Oracle-specific SQL extensions) also helps to keep Oracle customers tied down. Which is good for us Oracle died-in-the-wool crowd. Whether the lock-in is good for the customers (or even Oracle) is another question; an existing customer lock-in can feel like a lock-out to new customers.

Any thoughts out there?

Regards Nigel

Data warehouse appliance pros and cons

Andy Hayler writes here about the marketing hype surrounding data warehouse appliances like Netezza, and warns that buyers should not just consider the 20% of a project budget that is typically spent on hardware and software. The other 80% goes on - well, people like us.

However the economic case for the Netezza model can still be made - rather easily. I’m aware of a POC where the capital costs of a 50TB Netezza solution are considerably less than the business is being charged back each year just for the cpus and discs supporting the equivalent Oracle DW. The clincher is that Netezza doesn’t require the same level of DBA expertise - it just hasn’t got any tuning knobs for us to fiddle with. Oh, and critical queries run up to 150 times faster ...

If these appliances result in a hefty capital saving and a substantial reduction in DBA/performance tuning overheads, then they will certainly continue to gain market share.