

Oracle Announces an In-Memory Technology, At an Ungodly Speed And Cost - nikita
http://blog.memsql.com/oracle-announces-an-in-memory-technology-at-an-ungodly-speed-and-cost/

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capkutay
"Just like mainframes, appliances don’t fit in the new world where customers
think in terms of nodes in data centers, availability zones, and
geographically distributed storage and compute. The new world is being built
on distributed systems."

Oh yes...mainframes that have been developed over decades catering
specifically to enterprise needs are far less superior than what a group of
20-something engineers at a social media company came up with.

Excuse the sarcasm, there are certainly places where distributed in-memory
data stores on commodity hardware are a fine solution. That does not mean its
taking over mainframe computing because that solves a completely different
class of problems.

~~~
justinsb
I think that mainframes are the solution to the problem that some applications
run well only on a single machine. Most software has been cluster-fied, but
there's one big one that is left: databases.

Mainframes are more expensive per-CPU-unit or per-IOPS. Google has shown that,
with the right distributed software, a cluster of cheap machines can be more
reliable because you avoid putting all your eggs in the mainframe basket. (The
tradeoff is that your software is more complicated and likely introduces new
failure scenarios).

So, although mainframes are indeed optimal for today's database, the NewSQL
hypothesis is that different database software will be able to run on multiple
machines, and so the mainframe will no longer be the optimal solution. This
(hypothesized) database would run on a cluster of commodity machines, and
should therefore be cheaper and hopefully more reliable. Moreover, just as
Google's clusters beat Altavista's mainframe approach, a clustered database
should scale to much bigger workloads than the biggest mainframe.

Of course, this relies on a new breed of database.

~~~
capkutay
Very interesting points.

'Google has shown that, with the right distributed software, a cluster of
cheap machines can be more reliable because you avoid putting all your eggs in
the mainframe basket.'

'Moreover, just as Google's clusters beat Altavista's mainframe approach, a
clustered database should scale to much bigger workloads than the biggest
mainframe.'

My one comment on those points is that distributed computing solved Google's
problem, and of course applies to what many software companies are trying to
do (amazon, yahoo, etc.) But do they have an answer for the set of problems
where 100% ACID compliance and high-availability is a requirement?

~~~
haimez
ACID compliance is not ever a strict requirement, it's an abstraction
guarantee. If you have a fully ACID compliant database with a sufficiently
expressive query interface, then the complexity of the datastore is a perfect
abstraction.

The ATM machines people use every day to exchange money are not fully ACID
compliant, and they do not use "transactions". It's a calculated choice on the
design of the system to account for the guarantees in different ways and
balance discrepancies that occur after the fact.

If you need full ACID compliance and need to operate at "Google scale", you
reorganize the problem so that you don't need the compliance.

------
joshuaellinger
I've been told that Terradata runs $1M/TB. So Larry is kind of right about the
cost relative to his peers.

The columnar store I use are in the $10K/TB range running on $10-25K servers.

I think Oracle is going to have trouble with this space.

~~~
dman
Which columnar store do you use?

~~~
joshuaellinger
Some HP Vertica and some Actian Vectorwise. Vertica scales to multiple nodes
better and HP is a much more accepted vendor. I've got friends who are doing a
lot of Redshift (which is repackaged ParAccel). Start with Redshift if you are
new to columnar.

If you can afford it, Microsoft's new PDW looks like a much richer
functionality columnar store.

------
jjoe
Does anyone remember their acquisition of TimesTen? I've used it in production
(HF trading) but it didn't seem to gain that much broad traction. Is this just
TimesTen in a SPARC-packaged bundle? Perhaps IBM's plan to sell / phase out
its POWER server business has something to do with the re-branding of TimesTen
to this. [1]

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/timesten/overview...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/timesten/overview/index.html)

~~~
justincormack
IBM are not selling or phasing out Power. They are investing $1bn in Linux on
Power and opening up the platform.

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threeseed
Looks like it is designed to compete with the likes of SAP HANA.

And remember that you go with Oracle for more than just technology.

~~~
cheez
> And remember that you go with Oracle for more than just technology.

Can you explain this? In my experience, you used to go with Oracle for
technology but that was about 15 years ago.

~~~
grecy
Industry acceptance too.

In the heath care industry, it doesn't matter what you make, it doesn't matter
how good it is, and it doesn't matter how proven it is.

If you don't say the word "Oracle", you don't get the contract.

~~~
bigchewy
Source?

Talk to Judy at Epic and you get a different opinion. Actually, talk to almost
anybody I've ever met in my 10 years in healthcare and you'd get a different
opinion.

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NKCSS
The article mentions Fusion IO drives for $2k/TB; any idea who sells them at
that price? If I check [1], it's a lot more expencive. At $2k/TB, it would be
worth it to buy and compare it to our Netezza. If it can compete, awesome, if
not, I can beef up one of our normal SQL servers.

[1] [http://www.solidstateworks.com/ioDrive-
Octal.asp](http://www.solidstateworks.com/ioDrive-Octal.asp)

~~~
nikita
[http://www.storagepricing.org/fusion-io-pricing-at-ces-
with-...](http://www.storagepricing.org/fusion-io-pricing-at-ces-with-
ioscale/)

And $1/Gb is coming soon

~~~
NKCSS
But that's still more for resellers or large quantity buyers. I wasn't
planning on getting 100TB; I was just looking for 1-2TB to load a demo set and
compare to some of the stuff we do on our netezza. It's too bad there is no
Microsoft Technology Center near where I could take this for a test drive...

------
CurtMonash
As per [http://www.dbms2.com/2013/09/23/thoughts-on-in-memory-
column...](http://www.dbms2.com/2013/09/23/thoughts-on-in-memory-columnar-add-
ons/), this new technology makes a lot of sense if you're committed to Oracle,
and have the huge IT budgets to make such a commitment possible.

If you're just starting out, however, Oracle is rarely close to being cost-
effective.

------
programminggeek
What is the good use for a this vs a standard key value store like DynamoDB or
a document db like MongoDB?

~~~
threeseed
Lots of reasons. It supports SQL, you can gradually move data to the in-memory
stores, DBAs/Operations teams already know how to manage it and it is well
supported. Plus it would destroy both DynamoDB and MongoDB in certain use
cases.

