Database performance ramped up | Bangkok Post: tech

ORACLE

Oracle has updated its Exadata Oracle Database Machine, more than doubling performance while removing the bright red X and replacing it with a much more sedate silver one.

The new appliance (hardware and pre-configured, pre-installed software) is designed to cut deployment times, costs and is sold and supported by Oracle, preventing the finger-pointing hardware and software vendors often play when there is a problem.

Speaking to journalists in Bangkok, Christopher G Chelliah, Oracle General Manager for Exadata and Appliance Solutions, Asia Pacific, explained that the Oracle Database Machine, often referred to as the Exadata, is an Oracle Database bundled with hardware and specific storage for database applications.

The Database Machine solves the problem of data growing at an exponential rate through a combination of architecture and technology.

The technology side is straightforward. Infiniband connects the processing to the storage at speeds 10 times faster than fibre-channel (or 20 times faster than older fibre-channel that many still are using). Since the first release of the Database Machine, Intel chips have doubled in speed, and hard drives have gotten both faster and larger.

The architecture side, the Exadata software, changes the way database queries are performed.

Database queries are like finding a needle in a haystack. In the past, the storage would pass the entire database (the haystack) to the servers (across fibre-channel) for the database servers to sift through to find the needle.

With Exadata, a new technology that Oracle calls Smartscan, running on the storage, does part of the searching so only the needle is send across the Infiniband connection to the database server. This means that queries run faster and performance does not degrade as databases grow.

It also adds columnar-based compression - that is a fancy term that means 10x compression at full speed, or between 15 to 50x compression in archival mode.

Yet with the huge speed increase, customers do not see any difference from an application or software point of view. Existing tools, scripts and database administrators can work on the Exadata no differently than they would on any Oracle 11G database.

True was one of the launch customers for the first version of the Exadata, which was based on HP hardware.

The new version is based on Sun hardware and apart from the increased x86 CPU power, increased memory performance, and increased Infiniband bandwidth, also for the first time adds flash storage to further radically improve database speed. A system is typically configured with 5 TB of data which, with compression, means that up to 50 TB databases can be run at up to 50 GB/s, around five times faster than conventional magnetic media configurations.

Chelliah said that there are three easy sectors that he aims for when introducing Exadata to a market. First, those looking at data warehousing, such as True, which has many different lines of business yet wants a 360-degree view of a single customer. Next is the Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) space such as reservations, billing, core banking and enterprise resource planning that needs the performance and 24 by 7 availability.

The third group is what many CIOs are asking for even in the downturn - data centre consolidation. IT can take tens of databases, on which there could be hundreds of applications, and consolidate it into one Database Machine. Oracle software is licensed by the CPU, so it could be that consolidation means fewer licenses are needed at the end of the day, thus leading to further savings in maintenance and licensing.

Then there is the new market for homeland security, where governments need huge scale data warehouses for intelligence that would simply not be feasible without new architectures such as the Exadata.

At the low end, Chelliah said that a mortgage company in Australia has a quarter-rack Database Machine for its OLTP needs. This is a small operation with between 50 to 100 users. At the high end, he said that Database Machine clusters can go up against the biggest conventional architecture machines. PSBank in the Philippines provides a testimonial in which they saw a 124-fold improvement in performance without rewriting any applications - and that is before looking into storage cost savings, which they are only starting to do.

Exadata is choice and Oracle still sells just software for those who prefer to build systems to their own configuration. However, it does reduce the planning time from months down to weeks and more importantly it provides a pre-validated platform with predictable response times, rather than buying from different places and then seeing if it works.