Re: who's got the biggest and the fastest?

I don't recall a comment as such from Larry, but Oracle already has the core functionality to compete with many of these upstarts. It's just a matter of leveraging it correctly and putting enough hardware behind it.

By "upstarts" I'm guessing you mean appliance vendors. You may find this an interesting read:
http://www.hiredbrains.com/HB-QuestionsWP.pdf

Most of the big players in data warehousing have a non-simplistic system. Some might call it Enterprise Data Warehousing or EDW. I am not aware of any Oracle EDW being replaced by any upstart/appliance, but I do know of at least one customer who tried and failed after 7+ months of pain and suffering. They have since given up on the appliance. It was unstable and didn't have the functionality that their oracle system had.

I've seen both RAC and large SMP warehouses work quite well. It comes down to requirements and budget and the correct application of technology.

For large DSS, the musts are partitioning, compression and parallel query. That's really it. And again, having enough hardware. It's pretty much become a hardware stockpiling game. The CPU core counts are going into the hundreds and the I/O bandwidth into the high single, to low double digit gigabytes per second. After that, it's down to good execution plans.

I'd also suggest understanding how the products work, not just their results. In order to get the high sequential I/O read rates, many appliances run just one query at a time. Why? Because you can't truly have sequential I/O when there is more than one process reading from a disk. I've been told that multi-user test break these appliances.

Feel free to contact me offline as well.

On 11/5/07, Robyn <robyn.sands_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Greg ...
>
> Yes, I've gotten the marketing pitch from a few different vendors and I can
> see through some of it, but I can also see the potential for the right kind
> of data and a specific kind of business need. And according the marketeers,
> some of the big players in data warehousing are making the switch (big names
> were dropped) and Larry Ellison has even acknowledged that Oracle needs to
> come up with something to beat the newest upstarts. Of course, some of the
> information being presented is clearly misleading; the challengers imply
> that Oracle maintenance is much more labor intensive than it really is these
> days and they neglect to mention that Oracle has many of the same features
> that they are bragging about.
>
> So now I'm reading through Winter Corps white papers and looking over their
> top 10, but 2005 was a while ago and I'm curious .... who's biggest and
> fastest now and what do they run? Have any of them really made the switch to
> shared nothing and mpp? If they're using Oracle, how do they do it? (for
> once, I probably do need RAC.)
>
> And the crux of my question - Is there a point where Oracle becomes the less
> optimal solution?
>
> I'm in a very preliminary evaluation stage at this point, but estimates for
> data loads are in the neighborhood of over a TB of raw data per day and it
> will need to be accessed fast and adhoc to some extent. What are the
> options to consider?
>
> Robyn

-- 
Regards,

Greg Rahn
http://structureddata.org
--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l