Oracle Press Release: Customers are Choosing the Oracle Database Machine

June 29, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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Exadata Snippits From Oracle F4Q09 Earnings Call

June 23, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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Facebook: Hive – A Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse Using Hadoop

June 10, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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Oracle And HP Take Back #1 Spot For 1TB TPC-H Benchmark

June 3, 2009
By Greg Rahn
Oracle And HP Take Back #1 Spot For 1TB TPC-H Benchmark

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...
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Blogroll Additions: Alberto Dell'Era & Christian Antognini

May 25, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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Oracle Sun FAQ

April 24, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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Merger Monday: Oracle Buys Sun Microsystems

April 20, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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?
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Kevin Closson's Silly Little Benchmark Is Silly Fast On Nehalem

April 10, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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Intel Nehalem-EP Xeon 5500 Series Processors Makes Databases Go 2X Faster

April 1, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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Larry Ellison Mentions Exadata Performance Numbers

March 19, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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The Impact Of Good Table And Query Design

March 19, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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Happy Anniversary To The Structured Data Blog

February 23, 2009
By Greg Rahn

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...
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