Exadata

I expect we’ll see some announcements at Oracle Open World in a couple of weeks (I don’t know if they will really call it V3 yet by the way).

DISCLAIMER: This is all complete conjecture on my part. I don’t work for Oracle and I have not had any conversations with any Oracle employees about official future directions or plans. (I probably would have had to sign a non-disclosure before I could have any of those discussions and then I wouldn’t be able to do this post).

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Anyway, here’s the list of things I am thinking we might see:

Bigger Database Servers - I mean physically bigger, with open slots, so we can put HBA’s in them to attach to external storage for migration and backup purposes. Sun 4275’s perhaps since they are already using them as storage servers. The only real issue is that we’d run out of space on a full rack configuration, but if the machines are beefier, perhaps we wouldn’t need as many DB servers anyway.

Bigger Database Servers - I mean more memory and more processing power. Faster chips and bigger DIMMs are a no-brainer. Just put them in the existing 4170 boxes. But how about different models altogether. M series perhaps (which also means a change in O/S). Should be fairly easy to do actually as the DB already runs on Solaris. Might make the Sun shops really happy as well. ;-)

More Options - I expect we’ll see a little more flexibility in the configurations, because “One Size Fits All” really doesn’t (or at least many people think that it doesn’t). Anyone want a 2/3 rack?

Here’s some white Exaddata text

Well, I guess it’s official. A couple of weeks ago I committed to write an Exadata book for Apress, along with my intrepid co-author Randy Johnson. For those of you who don’t know Randy, he’s a very experienced Oracle Guy with a wealth of knowledge, particularly around RAC. I think the two of us make a pretty good team - making up for each others weaknesses (oh wait, I should say we have “Complimentary Skill Sets” - yeah that sounds better).

Anyway, it turns out that writing a book is a lot of work! The way Tom Kyte turns them out I thought it must be pretty easy, but I’ve always been a little overconfident. So I’m starting to realize that I may not have time to do as many blog posts as I might like. But I must say that I am really excited about the subject matter! So I think it will be worth the effort. By the way, that’s not the official cover art (or even the official title as far as I know). I just hacked that together with a Adobe Illustrator. ;-)

I have plenty of things that are keeping me busy for OOW 2010 and you’ll all get to see the results at the event (if you’re there), but I only have one traditional technical session where I’ll be on stage. I’m presenting the following session jointly with an Oracle Database Machine customer:

Session ID: S316824
Title: Top 10 Lessons Learned in Deploying the Oracle Exadata
Tuesday, September 21, 12:30PM
Location: Moscone South, Rm 307

Check the OOW 2010 content catalog for updated room assignments and times.

Even better than a technical session is the interview and Q&A session I’m doing on Oracle Technology Network Live which is 30 minutes of pure technical talk about Exadata. The session is properly titled “Exadata for Geeks” and I’ll be joining Justin Kestelyn, editor of Oracle Technology Network at the OTN Lounge which is located in the Mason Street tent this year (*not* the previous location in Moscone West).

Significantly, this year I elected not to organize what would have been the 3rd annual pre-OOW scuba dive in Monterey Bay. Time and my work requirements are the primary reasons for this, but it also is a result of the fact that not a single person asked me about it, so apparently it was just for me after all . Instead, I’m hoping that I might get to visit Alcatraz this year. I’ve been to SF so very many times in the past 12 years, but have yet to take that tour, so I think it’s time (I’ve heard it is a really interesting tour).

See you in SF!

By now you have probably heard about ExaData Hybrid Columnar Compression (EHCC), but what benefit can EHCC give you in terms of storage and performance savings?  
 
As always, it depends on your data.  Below I’ll share some of the test results I came across when testing EHCC. The data used for these tests are a short version of a fact table.
 
By the way, as you may already have noticed, English is my second language, so please excuse me for spelling, grammar and whatever errors you may find in this post ;-)
 
- Test block compression against EHCC compression tables
First let’s look at the time it took to create the test data and the compression rate.
 
-- None compressed table
SQL> create table he100_par PARALLEL 16
      as
       select h.event_seq, h.c_id, h.e_id, h.t_id, h.begin_time, h.end_time,
              h.name, h.a_id, h.r_id, h.i_id, h.value_type,
              to_number(value) value
         from load_staging h
        where instr(translate(h.value,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ',
                                      'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'),'X')=0;
Table created.

It has been quite a while since my last Exadata-related post. Since I spend all my time, every working day, on Exadata performance work this blogging dry-spell should seem quite strange to readers of this blog. However, for a while it seemed to me as though I was saturating the websphere on the topic and [...]

Randy Johnson has done a brief post after applying BP5 on our Exadata Lab machine. Looks like it went pretty smoothly with the exception of a problem with DBFS and some misleading comments in the README file regarding using the RDS protocol (both of which we had in play). Here’s a link to his post:

Exadata Bundle Patch 5 Gotcha’s

Well we had to give it a shot.

So we created an Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software CELLBOOT USB flash drive. I’m not kidding, that’s what the Oracle/Sun guys decided to call it. They didn’t even use an acronym in the manual (I guess “ESSSCB USB FD” doesn’t roll off the tongue much better than the whole thing anyway). We used the make_cellboot_usb utility to create the thing off one of our storage servers, which by the way was not that easy to do, since the USB ports are in the back of the 4275’s and they are not easy to get to with all the cabling that’s back there. Anyway, once we had the little bugger created we pulled it out of the back of the rack and booted a Dell Latitude D630 off of it. Here’s a picture:

Notice the thumb drive is all lit up like a Christmas tree.

Here is a close up of the screen (in case your eyes are going bad like mine):

So we tried a couple of different options but eventually got to this screen:

This is an investigation into an half rack database machine (the half rack database machine at VX Company). It’s an exadata/database V2, which means SUN hardware and database and cell (storage) software version 11.2. I build a table (called ‘CG_VAR’), which consists of: - bytes: 50787188736 (47.30 GB) - extents: 6194 - blocks: 6199608 The [...]

For those of you who haven’t followed all the Oracle Exadata and database machine information, and want a brief introduction to the database machine: here it is! The confusion There is some confusion about ‘exadata’ and ‘the database machine’. If we look at the official product names, ‘Exadata’ is the storage server, and the ‘Database [...]

The second installation step of the database machine aka Exadata by Oracle ACS (Advanced Customer Support) is configuring the database and storage (‘cell’) nodes/servers. The blades are delivered with default IP addresses, during this step they are configured to the IP addresses which fit in our environment. Also the cellservers are configured (‘LUN’s are carved’) [...]