Scaling your Oracle Warehouse - two alternative approaches

HP and Oracle have recently announced the HP Oracle Database Machine. This has been positioned by Oracle as a competitor to the various vendors of data warehouse appliances. The HP Oracle Database Machine is enabled through a second product, the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server, which can be added to existing instances of Oracle 11g to improve performance in data warehousing environments. However, the addition of Exadata to an existing Oracle environment is not the only option available to Oracle users having performance and/or scalability (the two are related) issues. Dataupia offers an alternative approach for Oracle customers wanting to extend their existing implementation rather than replacing it. In this paper we examine how Exadata works and where it will improve performance and we will then go on to compare this approach to that of Dataupia and to consider when each approach would be preferable.

We assume in this paper that the reader is familiar with Oracle database technology (10g, 11g et al) as we will not be discussing this in any detail. However, this may well not be the case with Dataupia so, briefly, Dataupia offers a massively parallel shared-nothing appliance that works in conjunction with existing Oracle implementations (and not just with Oracle 11g) by taking over storage management from the database. It does not require any change to existing applications running against the Oracle data warehouse. Its major benefits apart from greatly increased (order/orders of magnitude) performance and scalability, include speed of implementation, advanced mixed query workload capability, and hugely reduced database administration requirements.

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