Mark Davison at Oracle OpenWorld, San Francisco – The star attraction in San Francisco Bay on Sunday was undoubtedly Oracle Team USA which managed two wins in the America’s Cup, but the star at the Moscone Centre downtown was the sponsoring company’s CEO Larry Ellison with three major announcements which could prove to be the bedrock of the company’s future strategy.
With Emirates New Zealand needing just one more win to clinch the America’s Cup, Oracle Team USA’s Sunday fight-back gave them a glimmer of hope in retaining the coveted yachting trophy. They need four more wins to keep the Cup in the US following a two-point penalty at the beginning of the series of races. The two countries will continue to do battle on Monday with Oracle Team USA undoubtedly being boosted by the influx of 60 000 delegates to this year’s OpenWorld.
Clearly buoyed by his racing team’s performance earlier in the day, Ellison got straight to the point in the first of his key announcements: An in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c. He explains that by adopting columnar technology highly compressed in memory aimed at making queries run 100 times faster, Oracle developers had soon discovered that it also made transactions faster.
“What we are talking about here is pure columnar technology highly compressed in memory,” Ellison says. “Once you have the columns stored you can process data at ungodly speeds. With two processors with 16 cores, each of these cores can process billions of rows per second. And we’re able to do this because there is an exotic instrument within CPUs called vector instruction, so you get increasingly high speeds.”
Ellison proved to be extremely conservative in his estimates of increased speed at 100 times the conventional as an on-stage demonstration showed when it did analytics on a Wikipedia query. The demo was 1 370 times faster than traditional methods, with the in-memory option processing 7-billion rows per second.
“There is a new game-changer that’s coming with 12c and the in-memory option,” Ellison says. “The numbers are pretty stunning and things that used to run in hours now run in literally a few seconds.”
There seemed little doubt among delegates that the in-memory option could become a standard within Oracle, but Ellison stresses that customers are under no obligation to adopt it.
“Let me be clear that the whole database doesn’t have to be in-memory to take advantage of in-memory,” he says. “You can still have some data on flash, some data on DRAM, but you can experience all of these benefits without any application changes – it’s a flip of a switch and it just works faster.”
Giving another indication of the importance of in-memory, Ellison then launched into his second announcement of the day: The Big Memory Machine M6-32.
“We decided that if we went to all the trouble of making the database faster, why not build a machine that is ideal for in-memory databases,” Ellison explains. “So we designed the Big Memory Machine M6-32. It’s available … let me think, let me think … today. It’s immediately available and it’s the fastest machine in the world for databases stored in-memory.
“This is terabyte scale computing, a 3Tb/sec system with two-times the memory and two-times the system bandwidth [of its competitor],” he adds. “It’s much bigger, much faster at less than a third of the cost.”
Ellison seemed to openly relish his third and final product announcement: The Oracle Backup Logging Recovery Appliance.
“You’re probably asking, who named this?” he smiled. “I did. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.
“The fact is, backup appliances are not designed for databases,” he continues. “People use these appliances and backup software to back up their databases and the problem with treating databases as files is that when you have to restore, you lose data. Plus, doing backups costs a lot in CPU processing time because the database is making a copy of itself, especially when you are running transactions at the same time. These appliances are also not scalable, so when you have hundreds of databases, you have to have hundreds of appliances.
“That’s the main reason for launching the Backup Logging – a key word – Recovery Appliance,” he says. “It’s designed for databases and the appliance doesn’t have to be in the data centre with the database. It can be in another location or it can be in the cloud, so if a mistake is made or you come under some kind of cyber attack, you can recover to the last transaction.
“And, by the way, it will backup any database – IBM, Fujitsu – not just Oracle,” Ellison adds. “There is nothing like this in the marketplace and we are also offering it as a cloud service on the Oracle Public Cloud as an option.”
