Ellison’s Bark is Far Bigger Than his Bite
Thursday, January 28, 201006:41 pm EDT
Larry Ellison’s latest rant takes aim at IBM’s DB2 distributed database. The upside for IBM is that Oracle is still looking over its shoulder. Sure, Oracle has the OLTP market share lead, but it is the newbie in the appliance market and will have to prove that its Sun acquisition will help it to close the sizable gap. Teradata, IBM, and Netezza have a significant lead in creating database appliances, especially for the data warehouse market. Even Microsoft is in the appliance business with its DATAllegro acquisition (aka “Madison”) scheduled for release later this year.
Ellison specifically pointed to DB2’s lack of scalability in claiming Oracle’s superiority. The problem is that Oracle’s Exadata 2 is based on the same RAC software that has NEVER delivered dramatic scale-out. Throwing upwards of 20 or more Sun servers, flash memory, and Infiniband into Exadata 2 has to count for something, but tying this all together with RAC seems flawed from the start. The flash memory is required to overcome RAC’s i/o bottlenecking inherent in having all those servers hitting a single copy of the database. Without Infiniband, RAC’s performance penalty (trying to balance the buffer pool cache shared among all those servers) would be as prohibitive as it’s always been. And despite all this investment, Exadata 2 can’t provide disaster recovery or mitigate a single point of failure around its singular storage model without adding a whole bunch more hardware and software at great expense.
At xkoto, our GRIDSCALE software solution has been addressing RAC’s shortcomings for years, working with the likes of IBM DB2 and now Microsoft SQL Server. In fact, xkoto is frequently called in when customers have thrown up their hands in resignation over the gap between RAC’s claims and reality. With a true scale-out architecture, GRIDSCALE manages an active-active pool of DB2 or SQL Server instances to deliver continuous availability, query load balancing, and disaster recovery.
What we haven’t heard Ellison admit is that without Sun in his empire, he would have a tough time keeping up with the database appliance leaders. Just barking about the competition doesn’t make you top dog.
