Larry Ellison managed to pull off a surprise at OpenWorld last month with the launch of the HP Oracle Database Machine, a combination of storage software from the database giant and a rack of pre-configured infrastructure from the equipment vendor. The two firms promise an improvement in query performance by a factor of 10 or more.
On the Oracle Sponge blog, Mark Cudmore said there are a number of such hybrids coming out. “Traditionally, vendors in this space offer software and hardware solutions bundled together (i.e. Teradata). We have seen offerings in the past year and a half where storage only solutions are being sold, and in other cases just some software supercharging below the database level,” he wrote. “In these solutions, you keep your DBMS (Oracle, MS, etc) the same, the software integrates at a low level in the DBMS software architecture. It is like dropping a V8 in your compact car, your controls stay the same, but you have a tad more power.”
Simba Technologies’ CEO Amyn Rajan said he was impressed by the three years of work that went into the product. “While a data warehouse appliance is great for corporations because it makes setting up and configuring a data warehouse easy, to get something of quality takes time to design, build, and test,” he wrote. “As such, leaders in this space such as Teradata and Netezza, while challenged by the likes of the Oracle Database Machine, will not disappear.”
On a lighter note, Philip Howard wondered if Larry Ellison got the idea for the product by reading comic books. “The project went under the codename of Sage and, while Oracle didn’t tell me more than that, I am guessing that this actually relates to the Marvel character of the same name, a member of the X-Men and X-treme X-Menk,” he wrote.
“She is described on the official Marvel site as ‘a mutant who possesses a cyberpathic mind that functions like a computer with unlimited storage capacity. Sage is able to record and analyze vast amounts of data…and can also calculate complex statistics in mere seconds…like a computer, Sage is able to perform multiple tasks at once by allocating a partition of her brain to each task.’”