Exalytics from Oracle: All-in-memory database & new UI

Exalytics is based on Oracle’s Sun Fire X4470 M2 server, which debuted at the end of June. A four-socket box based on Intel’s ten-core “Westmere-EX” Xeon E7 processor, it crams 1TB of DDR3 main memory and a mere six disk drives into a 3U rack chassis. The X4470 M2 is a perfectly respectable and competitive Xeon E7 server – but that’s not what makes it an Exalytics appliance.

What transforms this server into an Exalytics appliance is its parallelization of the TimesTen relational OLTP and Essbase multidimensional OLAP databases, as well as parallelizing the analytics algorithms so that they run well across the 40 cores and 80 threads in the X4470 server – Oracle bought TimesTen in June 2005, and snapped up Hyperion, the creator of Essbase, in March 2007.

And en there’s the fact that those databases are run in memory instead of on flash drives or, heaven forbid, disk drives. Hooking the box up to an Exadata OLTP/data warehouse appliance can extract data from production systems as end users hammer the Exalytics appliance with questions.

“Everything runs faster if you keep it in DRAM,” Ellison said, stating the obvious.

But thanks to the compression algorithms that Oracle has cooked up on those in-memory databases, both of which were acquired by Oracle, and not developed in-house – about which Ellison has no shame.

The X4470 M2 server underlying the Exalytics appliance is able to have about 5TB of data in memory thanks to compression – although sometimes, depending on the data, you can get 10TB data into memory when the compression is really working well.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/03/oracle_launches_exalytics_bi_appliance/