Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made three key announcements in his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, the company’s annual conference for customers and partners in San Francisco. Ellison unveiled the Oracle Database In-Memory Option to Oracle Database 12c which he said speeds up query processing by "orders of magnitude" and also doubles transaction processing rates, the M6 Big Memory Machine, and the new Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance.
In-Memory Option
The Oracle Database In-Memory option is designed to enable 100x faster queries to enable customers to get instantaneous results and increase transaction processing rates by 2x, said Ellison. The option helps customers accelerate database performance for analytics, data warehousing, reporting and online transaction processing (OLTP). Oracle’s unique in-memory optimizations enable real-time ad hoc analytics on live transactional data while also accelerating OLTP.
“There are no changes to SQL, no changes to your application, no functions that are restricted,” said Ellison. “Everything that works today works with the in-memory option turned on.” In addition, there is no loading and reloading of data, he said. “Just throw a switch, there is no data migration.”
In addition, he noted, “The in-memory option works beautifully with the multi-tenancy option in 12c so all of this technology is cloud-ready and is ideal for the cloud.”
Explaining Oracle's goals with the new in-memory option, Ellison noted that in the past there have beenrow-format databases, and column-format databases that are intended to speed up query processing. “We had a better idea. What if we store data in both formats simultaneously?” According to Ellison, when you maintain the two formats, transactions go faster and there is complete transaction integrity with consistency between the two formats.
While it might seem counter-intuitive that database performance could be accelerated if you have to maintain both the row format and column format, Ellison said this is because analytic indexes which can slow down transaction processing are now superfluous. Data is maintained in both the existing Oracle row format and a new in-memory column format optimized for analytical processing. Both formats are simultaneously active and transactionally consistent. The Oracle database automatically uses the new in-memory column format for analytic queries and the existing row format for OLTP operations like ERP systems. As a result, whether it is your data warehouse or your transactional systems, queries should run 100x faster, Ellison said.
The M6 Big Memory Machine
Ellison’s second big announcement was the M6-32 – “what we call the Big Memory Machine,” that is “ideally suited for big memory databases.” Ellison said the new offering comes with up to 32 TB of DRAM, a brand new processor - the SPARC M6 that doubles the cores of the M5 that it replaced - and offers 96 threads per processor – “that is a lot of things going on in parallel." The M6 is available as a general purpose computer and in super-cluster form.
Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance
And finally, the new Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance is engineered specifically for database protection, said Ellison. It is designed to deliver near-zero data loss protection and a massively scalable architecture.
With the new appliance, update logs are shipped to the backup appliance so if for any reason a customer loses the database. “On the backup appliance, we not only have your backup, but we have all your changes to the database since the backup was taken. We have the logs so you don’t lose any data," said Ellison. “It is a back up appliance to back up databases not just the files.”
Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance can recover to the last transaction and do point in-time recovery. Moreover, Ellison noted, it keeps track of the backups so you know where all your backups are. It is all now centrally cataloged. There is a “database of databases” in the Backup Logging Recovery Appliance, said Ellison.
In addition, it does not have to be physically placed in the data center with a high speed connection to the database, he emphasized. Customers can put the new appliance in a remote data center or use Oracle’s newly announced Oracle Database Backup Cloud Service that allows customers to back up their on-premise Oracle databases to Oracle Cloud - or even replicate their Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance to Oracle Cloud for “belt and suspenders - just to be safe,” joked Ellison.
For more information, go to www.oracle.com.