Posts by flashdba

Um

"It is the first and the only autonomous OS in the world," Ellison said.

I heard a rumour that, every time Larry uses the word Autonomous, a kitten dies.

I foresee a headline on a website not a million miles away from here:

Microsoft Buys LinkedIn - Slips Weiner Into Satya's Backroom Staff

Hold on a minute

Has anyone actually read the latest Gartner market share analysis document? Look at table 4 on page 11, "Top 10 Worldwide Companies' Vendor Revenue From Shipments of SSAs". You'll see an interesting note at the bottom:

"Notes: Pure Storage's 2013 revenue was restated from $114.1 million to $67.8 million"

So when the latest market share came out, Gartner already knew that previous numbers concerning Pure were incorrect. Now it turns out even the restated figure for 2013 was wrong.

The real question therefore is, WHO restated the 2013 number from $114.1 to $67.8 considering that the S-1 shows it was actually $42.733m ???

Why?

"Other flash array startups' technology won't be able use such non-volatile technologies without major development work"

I don't see why that would be the case.

Value for money... at a cost

Wow, Oracle is going to allow me to get more value for money from my Exadata flash cache by storing data compressed at 2:1 ratio! This is sooo cool.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/engineered-systems/exadata/exadata-x4-changes-2080051.pdf

Hold on a minute though, what's this information on page 22: "Requires Advanced Compression Option on all databases that access compressed flash cache". It's not exactly clear but it looks like you need to by ACO licenses to make use of this compression feature.

And for a full rack X4-2 that's 192 cores * $11.5k list price * 0.5 license multiplication factor = over ONE MILLION DOLLARS of extra license costs. Plus 22% annual maintenance fees.

No wonder they didn't mention this in the press releases or on the data sheets.

http://flashdba.com/2013/12/20/oracle-exadata-x4-part-1-bigger-than-it-looks/

Old News

Oracle has been OEMing the LSI Nytro Warpdrive cards for years. It buys them in, files the LSI logo off the supercaps and then replaces it with a Sun logo.

It's been doing it since the Sun F40 cards were used on the X3 model back in 2012:

http://flashdba.com/2012/09/03/exadata-roadmap-more-speculation/

There Are None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See

The obvious answer is staring us all in the face... Léo Apotheker.

Man selling inferior product claims superior products aren't really superior

Can somebody please send him a link to the description of "Confirmation bias"?

MARketING

Love it... except the name: ULLtraDIMM

And people in marketing get paid so much to come up with this stuff. Surely that's evidence that there is no God?

"Oracle's own..."?

"The newer Exalytics box also adds in six of Oracle's own Flash Accelerator F40 flash cards..."

You mean those LSI Nytro Warpdrive cards with the logos filed off?

"It has been three years since Oracle launched the 11g database"

No it hasn't.

Oracle Database 11g was released in 2007: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/015307_EN

Even 11g Release 2 came out in 2009: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/032365

Er...

"This is a much larger memory footprint than most relational databases have today, says Miller, adding that it is difficult to find a single database with 6TB, 9TB, or 12TB of data."

No. No it isn't....

Ask Toolbar?

And on top of the relentless security fixes, we have to constantly fight off the installer's attempts to install the Ask Toolbar. I don't want the bloody Ask Toolbar! Oracle, you suck...

Shouldn't they know?

CTO James Candelaria added: "We expect a fully populated 30-node 360TB INFINITY to exceed 4 million IOPS and 40GB/sec throughput in real world use."

I don't get it. If it's an actual product then you would have thought they would know the performance figures rather than just "expecting"?

Handbags at Dawn

How about a handbag icon for use when a comment thread descends into petty a tit-for-tat hair-pulling bitchfest?

The way I see it is that party A and party B slug it out getting increasingly off-topic until innocent bystander C pops up with the handbag icon to say "you girls get a room", at which point A and B are embarrassed into silence and we can all get on with our lives.

Only problem is I see it getting worn out very quickly...

Oracle RAC - a technology without a use case

Oracle RAC was originally created as a scalability solution, the idea being that you could scale out using multiple nodes with "near linear" performance. It was also designed to offer high availability, but that was secondary - here is the description from the Oracle 9i RAC Concepts guide where the technology was introduced:

"With Real Application Clusters, you can scale applications to meet increasing data processing demands without changing the application code."

Anyone who has worked with RAC knows that it's nonsense to say you don't need to change application code. And as large x86 servers have become available and relatively cheap, the need for scalability through RAC has waned, so Oracle now presents it primarily as an HA solution. But it isn't ideal for HA because it introduces so much more complexity - the enemy of availability. Almost nobody has an application which uses TAF and FAN to ensure that users don't get kicked off when a RAC node fails; the majority of customers just restart their middle tiers to cope with a node eviction or crash.

And it's expensive too. Really expensive. So with virtualisation technology becoming increasingly used with production databases, what's the use case for RAC now? Oracle is nowhere in the hypervisor space, with OVM having less than 1% of the market according to IDC. This is why Oracle had to come up with the Pluggable Database feature of 12c, implementing a feature that SQL Server and other databases have had for years.

I'm sure that someone on here will seek to disagree, but I can't see a future for RAC. Oracle's licensing policy around virtualisation is an attempt to hold of the inevitable onslaught as more and more customers start running production databases on VMware, with all of the HA, scalability and management features that come associated with such an environment.

http://flashdba.com/2012/09/10/database-virtualisation-the-end-of-oracle-rac/

In Memory != Exadata

"Ellison says this will allow for companies to keep most of their databases in memory"

Oh yeah? Then why pay all that money in Exadata storage licenses (which are licensed per disk)?

And as for including 10x compression in the capacity figures... Meh.

Oracle press releases full of FUD? Who would have thunk it...

Isn't it always like this? Instead of letting their achievements stand for themselves, they always have to sour the news with some disingenuous comparison against 2 year old hardware from a rival vendor. It's the Oracle way.

Another Oracle way is to claim all the glory for someone else's results:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1853058

This was a Cisco benchmark on Violin Memory storage, but Oracle glosses over the former and neglects to mention the latter entirely.