Juan Loaiza, Oracle senior VP of systems technology, outlined the key technology innovations in both Oracle Exadata V2 and the Sun Oracle Database Machine in a recent interview with Oracle Magazine's Tom Haunert. Loaiza identified three key developments: Intelligent Oracle Exadata storage; Hybrid Columnar Compression; and the incorporation of Flash technology.

Oracle Exadata storage, Loaiza continued, is deployed in a grid scale-out architecture using InfiniBand networking. So it’s very high performance with very high-speed networking. Hybrid Columnar Compression provides much better compression than anything currently available and promises dramatic benefits for very large databases, he predicted. Finally, the incorporation of Flash technology into the Sun Oracle Database Machine has been accomplished in an innovative way that makes it easy to use, low cost and highly available.

One of the chief accomplishments involving intelligent storage in Oracle Exadata V2, Loaiza remarked, is what has been done to avoid storage bottlenecks. Query processing is now done inside storage, and instead of monolithic storage architecture, the application now employs scale-out storage architecture using modular building blocks that are basically servers with disks in them. Oracle uses an InfiniBand network that runs at 40Gb/second, which he identified as key to getting lots of data from storage into the database servers very quickly, especially as we bring Flash into the picture.

Explaining the operation of Hybrid Columnar Compression, Loaiza said the technology reorganizes the data into a column-oriented format to achieve much better compression. Previous generations of compression typically achieved 2 to 4 times compression on user data. With Hybrid Columnar Compression, he pointed out, 10 times or more compression is typical.

Loaiza noted the two modes for Hybrid Columnar Compression that are in use. One is a very fast mode called compress for query, and another is a mode that optimizes space called compress for archive. A very large financial company has achieved 19 times compression with compress for query mode, which is a tremendous compression rate, he claimed, adding that a scientific customer saw 70 times compression with compress for archive mode.

Feedback from customers with very large databases is encouraging, according to Loaiza. For example, a telecom customer that tried Hybrid Columnar Compression using call data records, which traditionally don’t compress very well, is achieving over 6 times compression. This is much higher compression than the company has ever seen before with call data records.

Turning to the issue of Flash technology, Loaiza reported that, instead of employing it as a kind of disk drive (with a disk-drive interface and installed behind a disk controller), Oracle Exadata V2 now uses Sun's FlashFire technology, where the Flash memory actually sits on a PCI card that goes directly into the motherboard of the servers. This, he continued, is much, much faster than using Flash as a disk drive.

FlashFire in the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers is employed primarily as a cache in front of the disk drives. There are 5TB of Flash in a one-rack Sun Oracle Database Machine, and the management of which data goes on disk and which data goes on Flash is automatic. As data becomes active, it is moved automatically into Flash so that subsequent accesses will get the performance of Flash, Loaiza noted.

Haunert asked how OLTP [online transaction processing] customers benefit from Oracle Exadata V2, and Loaiza responded by saying, with newly introduced support for OLTP, these customers get great benefits from the intelligent storage grid, given the capability to offload query operations for OLTP just as for data warehousing.

Loaiza went on to say that one of the unique features of Oracle technology is that it enables customers to run very complex and sophisticated OLTP applications in a scale-out grid infrastructure using Oracle RAC [Oracle Real Application Clusters]. This includes applications such as Siebel, PeopleSoft, and Oracle E-Business Suite. The other key OLTP feature is the use of Flash in Oracle Exadata V2 to greatly speed up OLTP. With the Flash in a one-rack Sun Oracle Database Machine, it is possible to run at more than a million I/Os per second, which is a rate that has never been seen before. Before Oracle Exadata V2, it would take around 100 racks of storage to achieve that kind of performance, and it would cost millions and millions of dollars, he pointed out.

Asked to compare the performance of Oracle Exadata V1 with that of Oracle Exadata V2, Loaiza noted that Oracle Exadata V1 featured the intelligent, scale-out storage grid and was able to run queries at a rate of 14GB/second off disk, 5 to 10 times faster than other, much bigger storage devices. Oracle Exadata V2, by comparison delivers disk performance that is 50 percent faster than in Oracle Exadata V1.

What is even more important, he continued is that the compression technologies are a key part of the data-warehousing story in Oracle Exadata V2. If 10 times compression is achieved with Hybrid Columnar Compression technology, the customers’ very large data warehouses — whether they are 1TB, 10TB, 50TB, or 100TB, can be shrunk in size. This greatly improves performance. Also, it’s very cumbersome to do backup or restore or reorganization of the data on these extremely large systems. If you can shrink the size by a factor of 10, it makes it easier to manage and also gives much lower cost and much higher performance, he concluded.

More Information

Podcast of the Loaiza interview

Sun Oracle Database Machine with Sun FlashFire Technology

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