Oracle Magazine - September/October 2010

What Would You Do
with a Million?
Organizations are doing more with
Oracle Exadata and its 1 million I/Os
per second.

We first featured Oracle Exadata V2 and the Sun Oracle Database Machine in the November/December 2009 issue of Oracle Magazine. We reported on the September 2009 product release announcement, and I wrote a few words in this column focusing on some significant product metrics.

One of those key metrics is the fact that Oracle Exadata V2 is twice as fast as Oracle Exadata V1 for data warehousing. Another metric: Oracle Exadata V2 is capable of executing 1 million random I/Os per second. Almost a year later, the numbers for Oracle Exadata V2 continue to impress—and so does what this game-changing technology is doing for business.

key to delivering 1 million I/Os per second in Oracle Exadata V2.

This extreme I/O capacity goes so many times beyond the I/O requirements of typical applications that the next question becomes “What would you do with a million I/Os per second?”

NEXT STEPS

WORKING WI TH I/Os

In this issue, “Oracle Exadata at Work” (page 42) presents the experiences of three organizations using Oracle Exadata and its unmatched I/O capacity. Executives and technologists from these companies describe getting more information about more information in data warehouses, storing and quickly accessing terabytes of information across millions of rows, and running more and faster calculations in OLTP applications. They also talk about the value of Oracle Exadata and the additional opportunities it presents for their organizations.

The question “What would you do with a million I/Os per second?” has been addressed by the many organizations that are currently using Oracle Exadata V2; “Oracle Exadata at Work” presents a small part of the answer.

READ more about Oracle Exadata V2 “Do the Math” bit.ly/exadatamath “Announcing Oracle Exadata V2” bit.ly/exadatanews “Oracle Reveals Strategy and Customers for White-Hot Exadata” bit.ly/exadatastrat Oracle Exadata V2 product information bit.ly/exadatainfo LEARN more about Oracle Open World, Oracle Develop, and JavaOne oracle.com/openworld oracle.com/develop oracle.com/javaone

WHAT’S IN AN I/O?

I/Os have long been considered “expensive” operations in application and query design, and minimizing I/Os has been a key goal of a lot of application and query tuning. Keeping data in fast main memory, limiting slower disk-based I/Os, and avoiding I/O contention are all critical to the performance of high-volume online transaction processing (OLTP) applications and data-intensive query routines. But the information explosion continues, and keeping all your enterprise information in main memory is not always possible. What is possible is making the interconnect from main memory to storage better with InfiniBand technology; making persistent memory better with solid-state Flash storage; and making storage software that can optimize what the storage hardware and connections can do to prevent I/O bottlenecks. Along with InfiniBand and Flash technology, Oracle Exadata software is the

IN ADDI TION

Note the addition of MySQL Sunday to the Oracle Open World, Oracle Develop, and JavaOne triumvirate; it promises to be a great day. And I hope to see as many of you as I can at one of the many events taking place Sunday, September 19, through Thursday, September 23—not to mention Java University on September 24—in San Francisco, California.