Just a quick post to spread the news that Oracle Database 11g Release 2 is now generally available. Download it for Linux today. See the press release for the usual details. Here is an interesting tidbit of info from a PC World article: The new release is the product of some 1,500 developers and 15 million hours of testing, according to Mark Townsend, vice president of database product management. Update: In reading Lowering your IT Costs with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 I noticed this interesting tidbit: With Oracle Datanase 11g Release 2, the Exadata Storage servers also enable new hybrid ...

11gR2, Oracle

Even though Oracle OpenWorld 2009 is a few months away, I thought I would take a moment to mention that the Oracle Real-World Performance Group will again be hosting three sessions. Hopefully you are no stranger to our Oracle database performance sessions and this year we have what I think will be a very exciting and enlightening session: The Terabyte Hour with the Real-World Performance Group. If you are the slightest bit interested in seeing just how fast the Oracle Database Machine really is and how it can devour flat files in no time, rip through and bend data ...

Exadata, Oracle, Performance, VLDB

A number of weeks back I had come across a paper/presentation by Riyaj Shamsudeen entitled Battle of the Nodes: RAC Performance Myths (avaiable here). As I was looking through it I saw one example that struck me as very odd (Myth #3 - Interconnect Performance) and I contacted him about it. After further review Riyaj commented that he had made a mistake in his analysis and offered up a new example. I thought I'd take the time to discuss this as parallel execution seems to be one of those areas where many misconceptions and misunderstandings exist. The ...

Data Warehousing, Oracle, Parallel Execution, Performance, VLDB

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

Oracle and HP have taken back the #1 spot by setting a new performance record in the 1TB TPC-H benchmark. The HP/Oracle result puts the Oracle database ahead of both the Exasol (currently #2 & #3) and ParAccel (currently #4) results in the race for performance at the 1TB scale factor and places Oracle in the >1 million queries per hour (QphH) club, which is no small achievement. Compared to the next best result from HP/Oracle (currently #5), this result has over 9X the query throughput (1,166,976 QphH vs. 123,323 QphH) at around 1/4 the cost (5.42 USD ...

Data Warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Performance

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 does ...

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