Oracle Magazine - September/October 2010

marketing campaigns—everything from the creative content to the Websites where the ads ran to the effectiveness of the offers and the products sold.

“The faster you can get data to people and the more freedom
you give them in analyzing it, the more interesting the results
will be,” says Levine. “Every time we’ve made it easier and faster
for people inside or outside of the company to obtain data,
they’ve done things that we haven’t expected. I can’t tell you
exactly how that will play out once they can get information back
10 times faster, thanks to our deployment of Oracle Exadata, but
I know that they’ll be able to make better decisions faster—and
that will help them grow.”
Oracle Exadata provides a complete hardware and software
solution for high-performance data warehousing, online
transaction processing (OLTP), and mixed workloads. It includes
a massively parallel architecture and uses a wide InfiniBand
network to increase data bandwidth between the database
server and storage to deliver extreme performance for all data
management applications.

For LinkShare, Oracle Exadata’s extreme performance is paying off.

“With Oracle Exadata we’re finding that data loads much
faster and our queries come back much faster than they do from
the previous data warehouse,” says Levine. “Our customers will
be able to do analytics more effectively because they can do
them faster.”
In fact, industry analysts are seeing the same thing—that new
technologies like Oracle Exadata can create fundamental changes in
the ways that organizations analyze and react to data.

“With Oracle Exadata, organizations can really work with information to enable superior business decision-making by allowing analysts to consider more possibilities and do deeper analysis in the same— or even less—time,” says Merv Adrian, principal at consulting firm IT Market Strategy.

Fault tolerance was a reason that LinkShare chose Oracle Exadata, says Jonathon Levine, chief operating officer. “It’s fault tolerant in the way that the system degrades, rather than shuts down, for most kinds of faults that we see in production,” he says.

to learn new hardware or spend time installing and tuning all the
different components.”
Adrian even sees new opportunities for solutions like Oracle
Exadata. “I’m seeing something I call a transaction-processing data
warehouse,” says Adrian.

“It’s a hybrid combination
where OLTP systems reference
data warehouse information
for assistance in creating
customized responses for
specific situations. For
example, ‘what other products
should we offer this customer?’
Or, ‘what type of special deal
can we provide to this purchaser?’ These can be called ‘analytic
transactions’; they depend on look-aside processing to complete a
business process.”
In addition, Adrian describes Oracle Exadata as an extensible
database platform. “It’s not a proprietary, closed environment,” he
says. “It’s the world’s most widely distributed database, and people
know how to build on top of it.”

“With Oracle Exadata we’re
finding that data loads
much faster and our queries
come back much faster.”

—Jonathon Levine, Chief Operating Officer, LinkShare

SOFT WARE. HARDWARE. A
COMPLE TE DATABASE MACHINE.

The integration of software and hardware in Oracle Exadata delivers other key benefits.

“One of the more important value propositions of Oracle Exadata is that it’s preintegrated. The fact that Oracle owns the hardware and software gives the company the opportunity to deliver a much simpler value proposition,” says Adrian.

And according to Adrian, the software and hardware integration of Oracle Exadata also leads to significant savings in resource costs, since organizations can cut down on the number of expensive specialists needed to install and maintain an enterprise database machine.

“From my research, time to value is a big advantage,” says Adrian. “Organizations don’t want to send their personnel off for classes

FINDING NE W WAYS TO RUN A BUSINESS LinkShare has been in business for almost 15 years and has a huge amount of historical data that it relies on to analyze and help customers define effective internet marketing campaigns. That includes information on the types of ads that have run in the past, the