Re: Re: HCC in Pillar Storage

From: Kevin Closson <ora_kclosson_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2012 15:23:17 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <1337811797.31579.YahooMailNeo_at_web161704.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>



I went on the record as having said the Exadata-only thing was for technical reasons in the following post: http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/oracle-switches-to-columnar-store-technology-with-oracle-database-11g-release-2/  That was September 2009. I still stand by my words of that era. The fact that Exadata supported offload processing (filtration/projection/inflation) in the storage cells was the technical reason.

Now that Oracle has decided to go full circle and support this *generic* feature on (only) Oracle's standards-based storage (NFS via dNFS and FCP) I should think there must be at least a few customers who wonder why their 11.2.0.3 database isn't supporting a generic feature. There is no offload in S7000 or Pillar. The technology has gone full circle to where it was all the way through the Beta program for 11gR2. It is generic database functionality.  If customers who are paying their crushing annual contract fees aren't upset about this fact then I'm not either. But I'm not confused about the fact that features that are not individually licensed are due to all licensees.

Over the years, the sum of information I've forgotten nearly outweighs the knowledge I've retained. So let me ask, can anyone recall Oracle ever releasing a patch that *disables* intrinsic RDBMS features in the manner of bug 13362079? I can't. If ever there were such a patch I'd think it would detect whether the platform is IBM hardware and just immediately abort with ORA-600.



 From: Tim Hall <tim_at_oracle-base.com> To: tanel_at_tanelpoder.com
Cc: Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 12:19 AM Subject: Re: Re: HCC in Pillar Storage  

RE: "The whole game is pure marketing"

Indeed. HCC was part of the regular EE database product in the beta, but was later rebranded as an Exadata-only option, making Exadata more attractive to potential customers. Now the recent patch allows you to have ZFS/Pillar also, because they are Oracle revenue streams also.

As you've already heard, there are some advantages to running HCC on Exadata, but there is no technical reason it can't be run on any storage. If Oracle flipped the switch, we could all have it. :)

I have no problem with this situation. It's Oracle's business how the license their code. I just get a bit annoyed when you read marketing crap that implies there's a technical reason for it. There is not. It's purely marketing.

Cheers

Tim...

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 12:23 AM, Tanel Poder <tanel_at_tanelpoder.com> wrote:
> Sorry about double-post, mail trouble!
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 2:22 AM, Tanel Poder <tanel_at_tanelpoder.com> wrote:
>
>> Oracle supports HCC on Exadata and from 11.2.0.3 onwards on Oracle's (Sum)
>> ZFS appliance and Pillar. Obviously on non-Exadata the *de*compression
>> always happens at the database layer (on Exadata it depends on a number of
>> things). The compression always happens in the database layer on both
>> Exadata and non-Exadata.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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Received on Wed May 23 2012 - 17:23:17 CDT

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