The Oracle Blog

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Oracle Open World Larry Ellison - Extreme Performance

We've all been waiting for the big announcement from Larry Ellison at Oracle Open World. This one is definitely going to shake things up a little bit. Here at the Moscone Center it's standing room only. Safra Catz CFO for Oracle introduced the keynote speakers.

HP, Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group

By 2010 more than 1/3 of CEOs and CIOs say their current data center will be unable to meet growing needs. Their infrastructures are going to need to deal with Information explosion, CEOs demanding more from IT and an aging infrastructure of data centers.

They need to provide robust information to enable better business decisions. She said, HP blade servers have 50% of the blade server market. With the acquisition of EDS, HP is looking to manage more data centers for customers. She sees future data centers will have assets operating as a single virtual infrastructure. She showed a video of how data centers for HP have been evolving. They moved from 85 to 6 data centers. Highly emphasized blade servers. She sees virtualization as empowering deployments faster. She talked about PODs (performance-enhancing data centers) that can be built and shipped. They are portable. Want to use laser light beams instead of copper wire.

Oracle, Larry Ellison, CEO - Extreme Performance

Larry Ellison is here to talk about "Extreme Performance". Large data warehouses are doubling every few years. Current systems will not be able to handle the data bandwidth of future systems. "The Data Bandwidth Problem". Data warehouses start to slowdown at 10TB. Even the fastest disk storage systems start to fall apart at 10 TBs. Midrange storage arrays and NAS have trouble sooner. Multiple ways to solve the data bandwith problem. One way is to reduce the amount of data that needs to go from storage to database or increase the bandwidth.

Oracle is announcing Oracle's first hardware product, The Exadata Programmable Storage Server. They are partnering with HP on this. They are building intelligence into the storage to reduce data going through the pipes. It will pass query results back to database server not disk blocks. So instead of going through storage array and transferring all disk blocks to database server and database server filters out the disk blocks to generate a query result. The Exadata Storage Server. They pass the query to the storage arrays. Underlying ASM storage will perform parallel processing in the storage grid. This will take a lot of pressure off the bandwidth. Also will have wider pipes and more of them. They will have 2 Infiniband pipes. The Infiniband pipes are actually faster than the disk storage.

2 Intel processors: 8 cores
12 Disk Drives, up to 12 TB raw storage
Oralce Enterprise Linux OS
Oracle Parallel Query database software

The HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server Grid is available with Linux today. Other systems coming. Believe in scaling horizontally:

Exadata Storage Grid
Oracle Database Grid
Fusion Middleware Grid

The Oracle HP Database Machine is the second database announcement, its all packaged for you:

8 Oracle database servers
64 Intel processsor cores
Oracle Enterprise Linux
Oracle Real Application Clusters
14 Exadata Storage Servers
14GB/sec data bandwidth
112 Intel Processor Cores
1000 GB disk drives

Current testing has shown 10 times to 72 times faster than current systems. He said Oracle mirrored Oracle's Primary Financial Data Warehouse and ran it on the Exadata Storage Server Grid and it ran 30 times faster. Larry compared the Oracle Database Machine and showed how they believe this new Oracle hardware is much faster than Teradata and Netezza. He believes Oracle now has a major architectural advantage. He said the delivery model is HP for systems delivery and hardware service and Oracle will provide sales and system support.

A good friend of mine looked at the pricing model for this solution and I heard numbers from 2 - 5 million dollars. So make sure you bring your checkbook for this. This I need to look at in more deail.

My understanding is that HP has exclusivity with Oracle for six months and then other companies can start working with Oracle using this technolog. Not sure about this, I have to look at it in more detail.

Labels: Evaluation of Enterprise Linux for Oracle, Exabyte Database Server, George Trujillo, Larry Ellison

Monday, September 22, 2008

Oracle Open World - Evolving Role of the Oracle DBA

Changing Role of the DBA

The role of the Oracle DBA is continuing to evolve. If you look at the Oracle Open World conference anybody that is looking can see this change. The fundamental skills of the "traditional" DBA that knew administration, performance tuning and backup and recovery is not going to be enough for an Oracle DBA to stay highly marketable in the future. Another bad thing about having just the traditional skills is that those skills are the easiest to offshore.

Steve Lemme has been one of the leaders in the Oracle community discussing the evolving role of the DBA and how automation is going to also change the role of a DBA. Here is one link to look at: http::/eyeonoracle.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/04/16/can-oracle-dbas-survive-automation/#comment-12549

Increasing your marketability as an Oracle DBA

So I'm always being asked what areas should a DBA be looking at. I then answer with "it depends". To be successful in any area, you have to have a passion for what you are working on. So I'm going to give my perspective on areas to be looking at if you want to stay marketable, and increase your salary.

I love what I do and I want to keep doing it! "The Technical Track" - Oracle environments are getting more and more complex. Specializing in Oracle RAC, Data Guard, Streams, OEM and managing VLDBs is an area that is continuing to increase. These additional areas are not anything special. More and more companies are going to require DBAs have skills in some of these areas.
Show me the money! "The Money Track" - There is going to be an every increasing demand for DBAs that understand areas like Essbase, BI, OLAP, Hyperion, Stellant. Specializing in these areas is going to return you to the golden days of the dot com period. When DBA bill rates were very high and top DBAs could tell companies the salary they wanted.
Give me Fusion or give me death. "Fusion Track" - When Oracle Fusion Applications start to gain momentum there is going to be an enormous demand for DBAs that can support Oracle applications as well as DBAs that can manage multiple tiers of an Oracle infrastructure that includes the middle-tier.

Oracle Open World, September 21 - 25 2008

Blogging by George Trujillo at Oracle Open World.
blogs.sun.com/georgetrujillo
blogs.ioug.org

Saturday, September 20, 2008

IOUG SIG Day at Oracle Open World 2008

Definitely take a look at Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) SIG Sunday September 21, 2008 during Oracle Open World 2008 in San Francisco. The IOUG SIG day is going to contain technical presentations by recognized industry leaders in topics ranging from the database server, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Business Intelligence.

Labels: Oracle Open World

Oracle Open World - BEA Integration

While attending Oracle Open World (OOW) September 21 - 25 2008 attending presentations related to the BEA Integration into Oracle Fusion Middleware are going to be popular presentations.

Two Oracle booths in the Oracle Campgrounds I would definitely recommend visiting include:

Oracle WebLogic Server
Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE)

The Oracle WebLogic Server is going to be the key engine that runs Oracle Fusion applications. OEPE takes the most popular middleware development tool and provides Oracle WebLogic Server plug-ins for Eclipse 3.3 and 3.4.

Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle Open World