Oracle put out a press release today entitled "Customers are Choosing the Oracle Database Machine" mentioning the new Exadata and Oracle Database Machine customers. I've quoted a few parts of it below. Oracle cites twenty initial customers. Initial Customers Initial Oracle Exadata customers including Amtrak, Allegro Group, Automobile Association of the UK, CTC, Garanti Bank, Giant Eagle, HISCOM (Hokuriku Coca Cola), KnowledgeBase Marketing, Loyalty Partner Solutions, M-Tel, MTN Group, Nagase, NS Solutions, NTT Data, OK Systems, Research in Motion, SoftBank Mobile, Screwfix, ThomsonReuters, and True Telecom, confirm the benefits Oracle Exadata products bring to their Oracle data warehouses. Supporting Quotes "The HP ...

Exadata, Oracle

Oracle Corporation had its F4Q09 earnings call today and the Exadata comments started right away with the earnings press release: “The Exadata Database Machine is well on its way to being the most successful new product launch in Oracle’s 30 year history,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Several of Teradata’s largest customers are performance testing -- then buying -- Oracle Exadata Database Machines. In a recent competitive benchmark, a Teradata machine took over six hours to process a query that our Exadata Database Machine ran in less than 30 minutes. They bought Exadata.” During the earnings call Larry Ellison discusses Exadata and ...

Data Warehousing, Exadata, Oracle

Today, June 10th, marks the Yahoo! Hadoop Summit '09 and the crew at Facebook have a writeup on the Facebook Engineering page entitled: Hive - A Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse Using Hadoop. I found this an very interesting read given some of the Hadoop/MapReduce comments from David J. DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker as well as their SIGMOD 2009 paper, A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis. Now I'm not about to jump into this whole dbms-is-better-than-mapreduce argument but I found Facebook's story line interesting: When we started at Facebook in 2007 all of the data processing infrastructure was built ...

Data Warehousing, VLDB

Fellow OakTable Network member, Alberto Dell'Era, has starting blogging and I wanted mention it to my readers as well as add it to my blogroll. I've followed Alberto's works for some time and always was impressed by his thoroughness in investigation as well as explanation. Most recently I read his solution to the First International NoCOUG SQL Challenge and it immediately made me jealous as I've always liked math challenges, but my time has been dominated by HP Oracle Database Machine activities since its launch. Great solution Alberto! Often I wonder if programmers today even ...

Oracle

On Monday, April 20, 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun Microsystems. Since then there has been much speculation and question raised around numerous areas of the deal. There is an official FAQ that discusses many areas, but I thought I would highlight three that seem to be fairly popular around the blogosphere: Will the ownership of Solaris change Oracle’s position on Linux? No. This transaction enhances our commitment to open standards and choice. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships. What ...

Oracle

As I peek at the financial news this morning I see the headlines "Oracle Buys Sun". More information can be found at http://www.oracle.com/sun. Curt Monash has some first thoughts but I'll limit my comments at this time to "very interesting". What do you think? Good? Bad? Otherwise?

Oracle

Recently Kevin Closson wrote about the absurdly simple NUMA requirements for TPC-C on the new Intel Nehalem platform and I also mentioned my excitement that databases run 2X faster on Nehalem 5500 series compared to the Intel 5400 series processors. I do have to give credit to Kevin for being excited about Nehalem (the processors, not the river, though that is a very nice fish he caught) way back in March of 2007 when he wrote: [Nehalem] are quad core processors that are going to pack a very significant punch—much more so than the AMD Barcelona processor expected later ...

Oracle, Performance

As a database performance engineer there are certain things that get me really excited. One of them is hardware. Not just any hardware, but the latest, greatest, bleeding edge stuff. It is especially exciting when the latest generation of CPUs are twice as fast as the previous generation, and those being no slouch. This is how Intel's new Nehalem-EP Xeon 5500 series processors are shaping up. The big launch was on March 30th so in the past few days all the benchmark reports and blog posts have been rolling in. Here are a few ...

Data Warehousing, Oracle, Performance

Yesterday Oracle Corporation had its earnings call for F3Q2009. On the call Larry and Charles mention a few of the Exadata performance numbers observed. Larry Ellison: ...looking forward, I think the most exciting product we’ve had in many, many years is our Exadata Database Server... Exadata is 100% innovation on top of our very large and very strong database business. And the early results have been remarkable. Charles Phillips will go into a lot of detail but I’ll just throw a couple of numbers out there. One of our customers, and Charles will describe this customer, one of our customers saw a 28x ...

Exadata, Oracle

There are many ways to design tables/schemas and many ways to write SQL queries that execute against those tables/schemas. Some designs are better than others for various reasons, however, I think that frequently people underestimate the power of SQL (for both "good" and "evil"). All too often in data warehouses, I see tables designed for one specific report, or a very select few reports. These tables frequently resemble Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets (generally Pivot Tables), not good Dimensional (Star Schema) or Third Normal Form (3NF) schema design. The problem with such designs is that it severely limits ...

11gR1, Data Warehousing, Execution Plans, Oracle, SQL Tuning, VLDB

February 23, 2009 marks the 2nd anniversary of the Structured Data blog. Looking back, I guess I forgot to have a first anniversary, but oh well, I guess I'll celebrate twice as much this year to make up for it. The past two years have been fun and I've enjoyed sharing my experiences and interacting with the readers of this blog. I do wish I had a bit more time to commit to writing but I guess it is what it is. Being a bit of a perfectionist, I'd rather focus on quality than quantity. ...

Uncategorized

Over the past couple days I've been reading through the recent paper by Karen Morton entitled "Managing Statistics for Optimal Query Performance". In this paper Karen goes over many of the topics I have discussed as well (and a few that I have not) in the following blog posts: Troubleshooting Bad Execution Plans There Is No Time Like ‘NOW%’ To Use Dynamic Sampling Choosing An Optimal Stats Gathering Strategy DBMS_STATS, METHOD_OPT and FOR ALL INDEXED COLUMNS Overall I think Karen does a good job discussing the key issues related to object statistics and has examples to assist in understanding where and why issues can ...

Execution Plans, Optimizer, Statistics