Tuesday morning at OOW is always occupied by this forum, an opportunity for authors and others to receive a heads up on what’s coming down the pipe from Oracle. The following notes are musings from yours truly since I attended the forum today.
We first heard from Andy Mendelsohn, Senior VP of Oracle Server Technologies. Oracle’s concentration will be focused on three areas — big data, engineered systems, and the cloud. The Oracle BigData Appliance is the heart of their forage into this emerging data type. It has been optimized for Hadoop, R, and NoSQL processing. The Oracle BigData Connector provides a high-performance Hadoop-to-Oracle-database-integration solution. At the other end of the analytic solution lies Oracle Exadata and Exalytics, which complement one another. Oracle Exalytics comes pre-configured and optimized to be used with Exadata. Andy highlighted the processing chain from stream -> acquire -> organize -> discover and analyze.
He spoke more about their Exadata X3 offering. He reported its ability to perform 1,5 million SQL randam read I/O’s per second for OLTP environments and 100Gb/second data scan rate for warehouse and other reporting requirements. He mentioned the new lower cost 1/8 rack solution with half the flash as the quarter rack but still with a 2-node RAC solution. Half of just about everything is disabled in the eighth rack; it can be converted to a quarter rack by purchasing the appropriate license upgrade and “flipping a switch” to activate the disabled resources. A new generation Intel chip will provide immediate business benefits with sub-millisecond latency, sub-second analytics, and 10 times faster parallel jobs. He finished his address by discussing the pluggable database feature of Database 12c and stressing its:
- efficiency–more scalable with less hardware,
- lower operational costs–manage many as one, and
- transparency–no application changes.
We heard about Business Intelligence direction from Paul Rodwick, VP Product Management of Oracle Business Intelligence. He discussed the Enterprise Performance Management System. It sits on top of customers’ data sources regardless of the type. It contains prebuilt analytic applications. He stressed that it is the complete business analytics solution as it:
- reads any data from any source,
- provides a full range of analytics, which are richer and predictive,
- contains integrated analytical applications, and
- feeds results to any output module be it on the cloud, mobile, or anywhere.
Oracle’s position is that tablet devices present one of the biggest changes to BI processing, with an application already delivered to be used on 2nd generation iPads. The in-memory technology delivers:
- faster analytics / faster plans,
- better interactivity / visualizations, and
- more users / more queries.
Though not necessarily the norm, we were told about the delivery of the production go-live of an Exalytics box in as little as three days. Hyperion planning runs on the new Exalytics machines, providing:
- lower procurement spending in the magnitude of 5% in the first year and up to 7% the next,
- savings of up to $1 million by the end of year three,
- efficiency in application creation translating into IT and business savings,
- lower inventory working capital, and
- potential for increased sales and pricing.
Paul ended his session briefly discussing the challenges of processing vast amounts of unstructured data. Endeca Information Discovery ingests information from all data sources and indexes automatically. It prepares for sophisticated search with contextual navigation and visual analysis.
No comments