During his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Larry Ellison launched the new Exadata X3. The new version appears to have some nice new capabilities, including caching writes to EFD, which are likely to improve the usability of Exadata for OLTP workloads. And he was nice enough to include the EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K in detail on 30% of his slides as he announced the new Exadata. And for that, I give thanks. I am sure that Salesforce.com were similarly thankful when Larry focused so much of his time on their product in his keynote last year.
The post provides a bunch of good reasons why EMC VMAX might be a better choice for customers that run high-performance mission-critical environments. A highly recommended read!
Hi Bart,
Thanks for the post. Did I also read somewhere that he called it an in-memory database now? What he means is that it is all SSD, but in-memory? Really Larry???
Yes he did. And then had the guts to compare SAP HANA that uses DRAM using a real in-memory database with Exadata that is using classic RDBMS but caches data on Flash modules.
Well if you count Flash memory as memory, not disk, and ignore the differences with DRAM then you might get away with it. I hope Oracle’s customers understand this, too. The real in-memory database of Oracle is TimesTen but that does not run on Exadata, so he ignores it (as most customers do, I guess…?)
There was more of that stuff going on. He claimed to be the first with multi-tenant databases (hmmm) and made it seem as if data compression was invented this year by Oracle and no-one else has ever attempted to try that before.
Just wondering on which planet that guy has been the last few years.
Yes, it begs the question how serious he takes his (possible) customers, and from where I’m standing, it doesn’t look good!
Oh well… Nothing a few Oracle Marketing dollars wouldn’t solve…
PS I was talking to a large customer yesterday about Greenplum and guess what. They were running Oracle. It was just too easy to explain the differences in architecture and inform them that due to that, we usually outperform them and kick their ‘behind’! 🙂
Not surprising. Admitted, when Greenplum was acquired by EMC I was skeptical about the stories about how much faster it was compared to Oracle. Who believes stories like 100x faster… But it became clear when I started investigating the architectural differences. As long as customers give us a fair chance to show what’s possible, and don’t fall in the trap of tweaked Oracle Exadata POCs, we have the advantage 🙂
The new version appears to have some nice new capabilities, including caching writes to EFD, which are likely to improve the usability of Exadata for OLTP workloads. And he was nice enough to include the EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K in detail on 30% of his slides as he announced the new Exadata. And for that, I give thanks. I am sure that Salesforce.com were similarly thankful when Larry focused so much of his time on their product in his keynote last year.
Hi Bart,
Thanks for the post. Did I also read somewhere that he called it an in-memory database now? What he means is that it is all SSD, but in-memory? Really Larry???
Hi Ed, good to hear from you!
Yes he did. And then had the guts to compare SAP HANA that uses DRAM using a real in-memory database with Exadata that is using classic RDBMS but caches data on Flash modules.
Well if you count Flash memory as memory, not disk, and ignore the differences with DRAM then you might get away with it. I hope Oracle’s customers understand this, too. The real in-memory database of Oracle is TimesTen but that does not run on Exadata, so he ignores it (as most customers do, I guess…?)
There was more of that stuff going on. He claimed to be the first with multi-tenant databases (hmmm) and made it seem as if data compression was invented this year by Oracle and no-one else has ever attempted to try that before.
Just wondering on which planet that guy has been the last few years.
Always good to read your posts Bart!
Yes, it begs the question how serious he takes his (possible) customers, and from where I’m standing, it doesn’t look good!
Oh well… Nothing a few Oracle Marketing dollars wouldn’t solve…
PS I was talking to a large customer yesterday about Greenplum and guess what. They were running Oracle. It was just too easy to explain the differences in architecture and inform them that due to that, we usually outperform them and kick their ‘behind’! 🙂
Not surprising. Admitted, when Greenplum was acquired by EMC I was skeptical about the stories about how much faster it was compared to Oracle. Who believes stories like 100x faster… But it became clear when I started investigating the architectural differences. As long as customers give us a fair chance to show what’s possible, and don’t fall in the trap of tweaked Oracle Exadata POCs, we have the advantage 🙂