Oracle Exadata

Oracle Exadata is a database appliance with support for both OLTP (transactional) and OLAP (analytical) database systems.[1] It was initially designed in collaboration between Oracle Corporation and Hewlett Packard. Oracle designed the database, operating system (based on the Oracle Linux distribution), and storage software whereas HP designed the hardware for it. After Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, in 2010 Oracle announced the Exadata Version 2 with improved performance and Sun storage systems.[2]

History

Exadata was announced by Larry Ellison at the 2008 Oracle OpenWorld conference[3] in San Francisco for immediate delivery. The main headline was that Oracle was entering the hardware business with a pre-built database machine, engineered by Oracle. The hardware at this time was manufactured, delivered and supported by HP. Since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle circa January 2010, Exadata used Sun-based hardware. In August 2011, Oracle announced that Exadata database machines would be orderable with Solaris 11 Express (in addition to Oracle Linux).[4]

Technical details

Exadata X2-2 at Oracle OpenWorld 2009

Database servers X5-2

Each Database Server with

The Exadata X5-2 introduces an elastic scale-out architecture in which additional database nodes and storage cells can be added. The configurations (Eighth, Quarter, Half and Full) still exist but are not the only configuration options.

Database servers X4-2

Each Database Server with

The Exadata X4-2 comes in 4 different sizes

Database servers X4-8

2 Servers, each with

Storage Servers X4-2

Each Storage Server has

Database servers X3-2

A third generation was announced in 2012.[5] Each Database Server with

The Exadata X3-2 comes in 4 different sizes

Database servers X3-8

2 Servers, each with

Storage Servers X3-2

Each Storage Server has

Database servers X2-2

Sun Fire X4170 M2[6]

Database servers X2-8

Sun Fire X4800[7]

Storage Servers X2-2

There was also an expansion rack.[9]

Software

Software caches database objects in flash memory, replacing slow, mechanical I/O operations to disk with rapid flash memory operations. Software also provides logging feature to speed database log I/O. Exadata storage cells determine which rows contain values that are being queried. Smart Scan only returns blocks that are relevant to the compute nodes. Storage cells can take over data intensive processing from compute nodes.

Storage cells keep track on maximum and minimum values stored in different areas and use those values to determine where predicates can not exist. This allows the storage cell to not have to read the area at all thus saving time and processing cycles.

InfiniBand switches

The 2010 version of the product used Sun Microsystems datacenter InfiniBand switches with 36 ports.[10]

Database Machine Full Rack Database Machine Half Rack Database Machine Quarter Rack
Database Servers 8 4 2
Exadata Storage Servers 14 7 3
InfiniBand Switches 3 3 2
Upgradability Connect multiple Full Racks via the included InfiniBand fabric Field upgrade to Full Rack Field upgrade from Quarter Rack to Half Rack

Source Oracle Corporation [2]

See also

References

External links

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