Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

I recently took a peek at this online, interactive history of Oracle Corporation. When I got to the year 2008, I was surprised to see no mention of the production release of Exadata–the HP Oracle Database Machine. The first release of Exadata occurred in September 2008.

Once I advanced to 2009, however, I found mention of Exadata but I also found a couple of errors:

• The text says “Sun Oracle Database Machine” yet the photograph is that of an HP Oracle Database Machine (minor, if not comical, error)
• The text says Exadata “wins benchmarks against key competitors” (major error, unbelievably so)

What’s First, Bad News or Good News?

Bad News

The only benchmark Exadata has ever been used in was this 1TB scale TPC-H in 2009 with HP Blades.  Be aware, as I pointed out in this blog post, that particular TPC-H was an in-memory Parallel Query benchmark. Exadata features were not used. Exadata was a simple block storage device. The table and index scans were conducted against cached blocks in the Oracle SGAs configured in the 64 nodes of the cluster. Exadata served as nothing more than persistent storage for the benchmark. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there was no physical I/O. The database was loaded as a timed test (per TPC-H spec) which took 142 minutes and the first few moments of query processing required physical I/O so the data could be pulled up into the aggregate SGAs. The benchmark also requires updates. However, these ancillary I/O operations did not lean on Exadata feature nor are they comparable to a TPC-H that centers on physical I/O.  So could using Exadata in an in-memory Parallel Query benchmark be classified as winning “benchmarks against key competitors?” Surely not but I’m willing to hear from dissenters on that. Now that the bad news is out of the way I’ll get to what I’m actually blogging about. I’m blogging about the good news.

Good News

The good news I’d like to point out from screenshot (below) of Oracle’s interactive history is that it spares us the torment of referring to the Sun Oracle Exadata Machine as the First Database Machine for OLTP as touted in this press release from that time frame.  A system that offers 60-fold more capacity for random reads than random writes cannot possibly be mistaken as a special-built OLTP machine.  I’m delighted that the screen shot below honestly represents the design center for Exadata which is DW/BI. For that reason, Exadata features have nothing at all to do with OLTP. That’s a good readon the term OLTP is not seen in that screen shot. That is good news.

OLTP does not trigger Smart Scans thus no offload processing (filtration,projection, storage index, etc). Moreover, Hybrid Columnar Compression has nothing to do with OLTP, except perhaps, in an information life cycle management hierarchy. So, there’s the good news. Exadata wasn’t an OLTP machine in Oracle’s timeline and it still is not an OLTP machine. No, Oracle was quite right for not putting the “First OLTP Machine” lark into that timeline. After all, 2009 is quite close to 40 years after the true first OLTP Machine which was CICS/IMS.  I don’t understand the compulsion to make outlandish claims.

Bad News

Yes, more bad news. Oracle has never published an Exadata benchmark result even with their own benchmarks. That’s right. Oracle has a long history of publishing Oracle Application Standard benchmarks–but no Exadata results.

I’ve gone on the record as siding with Oracle for not publishing TPC benchmarks with Exadata for many reasons.  However, I cannot think of any acceptable excuse for why Oracle would pitch Exadata to you as best for Oracle Applications when a) there are no OLTP features in Exadata*, b) Oracle Corporation does not use Exadata for their ERP and c) there is no benchmark proof for Exadata OLTP/ERP capabilities.

Closing Thoughts

Given all I’ve just said, why is it that (common knowledge) the majority of Exadata units shipping to customers are quarter-rack for non-DW/BI use cases? Has Exadata just become the modern replacement for “[…] nobody ever got fired for buying […]?” Is that how platforms are chosen these days? How did we get to that point of lowered-expectations?

Enjoy the screen shot of memory lane, wrong photo, bad, good and all:

* I am aware of the Exadata Smart Flash Log feature.