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NoCOUG Referral
I would like to point you to two articles in the latest Northern California Oracle Users Group (NoCOUG) Journal here.
The first is an interview of Kevin Closson here. The interview is long and will take some time to get through… so set aside 30 minutes… it will be worth it as Kevin discusses Exadata, shared-nothingness, and other topics related to database hardware architecture.
The second article I would like to suggest (by the way there are several other excellent articles) is by Dr. Bert Scalzo. He reminds us that our job as engineers is to build the most cost-effective solution… not to build the perfect solution. He suggests that hardware should be treated as a dynamic resource that can be provisioned easily to solve performance problems.
I have argued that in a shared-nothing, scalable, architecture it is often cheaper to add another $20,000 fat server than to spend $100,000 of staff time to tune around a performance problem. This is especially true when the tuning involves building indexes and materialized views or pre-aggregated tables that make your warehouse fragile and more difficult to tune the next time. See here…
Back to Kevin’s interview and to tie the two articles together… Kevin suggests that as long as data flows into the CPUs fast enough then there is no reason to pick a shared-nothing architecture over a shared-everything architecture. He insists on symmetry and rightfully points out that a shared-everything system can be symmetrical. But it is more difficult to maintain symmetry as you scale up a shared-everything system… and easy scale is what is required to treat hardware as a dynamic resource. So… I remain convinced that shared-nothing is the way to go…
A Big Data Sound Bite…
Here is a sound bite on Big Data I composed for another source…
Big Data is relative. For some firms Big Data will be measured in petabytes and for other in hundreds of gigabytes. The point is that very detailed data provides the vital statistics that quantify the health of your business.
To store and access Big Data you need to build on a scalable platform that can grow. To process Big Data you need a fully scalable parallel computing environment.
With the necessary infrastructure in place the challenge becomes: how do you gauge your business and how do you change the decision-making processes to use the gauges?
Co-processing and Exadata
In my first blog (here) I discussed the implications of using co-processors to offload CPU. The point was that with multi-core processors it made more sense to add generalized processing hardware that could be applied to all parts of the query process than to add specialized processors that dealt with only part of the problem.
Kevin Closson has produced two videos that critically evaluate the architecture of Exadata and I strongly suggest that you view them here before you go on with this post… They are enlightening, irreverent, and make the long post I’ve been drafting on Exadata lightweight and unnecessary.
If you have seen Kevin’s post you understand that Exadata is asymmetric and unbalanced. But his post extends and generalizes my discussion of co-processing in a nice way. Co-processing is asymmetric by definition. The co-processor is not busy after it has executed on its part of the problem.
In fact, Oracle has approximately mirrored the Netezza architecture with Exadata but used commercial processors instead of FPGAs to offload I/O and predicate processing. The result is the same in both cases… underutilized processing capability. The difference is that Netezza wastes some power on relatively inexpensive FPGA processors while Exadata wastes general and expensive CPU resources that might actually be applied usefully elsewhere. And Netezza splits the processing within a shared-nothing architecture while Exadata mixes architectures adding to the inefficiency.
Exalytics vs. HANA: What are they thinking?
I’ve been trying to sort through the noise around Exalytics and see if there are any conclusions to be drawn from the architecture. But this post is more about the noise. The vast majority of the articles I’ve read posted by industry analysts suggest that Exalytics is Oracle‘s answer to SAP‘s HANA. See:
But I do not see it?
Exalytics is a smart cache that holds a redundant copy of aggregated data in memory to offload aggregate queries from your data warehouse or mart. The system is a shared-memory implementation that does not scale out as the size of the aggregates increase. It does scale up by daisy-chaining Exalytics boxes to store more aggregates. It is a read-only system that requires another DBMS as the source of the aggregated data. Exalytics provides a performance boost for Oracle including for Exadata (remember, Exadata performs aggregation in the RAC layer… when RAC is swamped Exalytics can offload some processing).
HANA is a fully functional in-memory shared-nothing columnar DBMS. It does not store a copy of the data.. it stores the data. It can be updated. HANA replaces Oracle… it does not speed it up.
I’ll post more on Exalytics… and on HANA… but there is no Exalytics vs. HANA competition ahead. There will be no Exalytics vs. HANA POCs. They are completely different technologies solving different problems with the only similarity being that they both leverage the decreasing costs of RAM to eliminate the expense of I/O to disk or SSD devices. Don’t let the common phrase “in-memory” confuse you.
