M-A-O-L

With new Sparc systems, Oracle begins shift to single chip architecture:

Oracle has announced a batch of servers based on new Sparc processors and in the process has begun an expected shift toward converging its two families of Unix servers onto a single chip architecture.

The new M-series server, called the M5-32, is a high-end SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) machine that Oracle will position against IBM’s Power 795 Unix server, its biggest. It supports up to 32TB of system memory — a huge amount — and runs on a new, six-core Oracle processor called the Sparc M5, which shares the same core as the Sparc T5 chip also announced Tuesday.

But [analysts] also wondered how much longer it will be economically viable for Oracle to keep developing its own microprocessors. Sales of its Unix hardware have been declining, and last quarter were at about half the level they were when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems three years ago.

Good old Sun technology…

How do I freaking scale Oracle?:

For the record, I’m a NoSQLer and a big data guy. After nearly 20 years of dealing with what I’ve come to refer to as “the beast” (aka Oracle), I’ve turned coat and decided I prefer solving the problem rather than mitigating it.

That said, many companies I work with have spent 20 years painting themselves into an Oracle corner. While they may have one eye on a brighter future, they still must ensure their Oracle database is high-performance and highly available — and scales as well as possible. Despite what you may read in NoSQL vendor marketing materials […], it is possible to scale Oracle.

There’s just one catch: Nothing I’m going to suggest costs less than my house for a nontrivial installation. Heck, when you include the hardware and data center resources, some cost more than my whole neighborhood

Go see the Oracle MAA for a lot more details.

NuoDB’s Pluggable Cloud Database:

Pluggable databases give developers and administrators the ability to create a database container and provision multiple databases within that single container. This is also known as multi-tenancy. The cloud environment is a prime candidate for pluggable databases.

Shot against Oracle… well done, but not answering the call for Oracle compatibility.

It’s never too late to change important terminology and confuse customers, that’s what Oracle must’ve been thinking…

Security Patch Update (SPU) terminology is introduced in the October 2012 Critical Patch Update as the term for the quarterly security patch.  SPU patches are the same as previous CPU patches, just a new name.  For the database, SPUs can not be applied once PSUs have been applied until the database is upgraded to a new base version.

via CPU, PSU, SPU – Oracle Critical Patch Update Terminology Update.

Everybody’s going all sentimental about Oracle these days… well, at least Curt Monash, who’s looking at Oracle’s evolution — overview. And TechCrunch, who are looking back at 45 billion worth of acquisitions since 2004.

Oracle buying WebOS from HP to power Exadata? Well not exactly, but still interesting rumour – what would Oracle do with WebOS?

Oracle docs show plans for Hadoop, NoSQL about the Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and Added Session: Big Data Appliance about Oracle’s Big Data Appliance.

Mike Hogan uses the following to suggest a move to NewSQL: Lack of Business Visibility Cripples Traditional SQL DaaS, Drives NewSQL.

the shift to a database as a service (DaaS) severely reduces the DBAs visibility into the business, thus limiting the ability to hand tune the database to the requirements of the application and the database. The solution is a cloud database that eliminates the hand-tuning of the database, thereby enabling the DBA to be equally effective even with limited visibility into the business and application needs

I agree with the problem positioning, but feel strongly that NewSQL is not a requirement to address the problem here, you can equally work a little services layer and put all the control into the hands of the user, essentially replacing (a lot of) the DBA tasks with automation and APIs.

What NewSQL gives you though, and we see that with Xeround and supposedly also ScaleDB, is the elasticity and transparent sharding that’s difficult to achieve with the more traditional Oracle, Sybase or SQL Server databases that are still often required in the enterprise space.