Oracle Big Data Appliance

Understanding the Big Data Appliance is a little harder than the other appliances.  While it was prominently featured on the appliance row outside of the keynote hall, it was not only off the entire show, it was, in fact, a piece of paper inside of a rack.

Here is what was publically announced:

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is an engineered system optimized for acquiring, organizing and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database 11g. The Oracle Big Data Appliance includes an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator with Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, an open source distribution of R, Oracle Linux, and Oracle Java HotSpot Virtual Machine.

Here is what I was told by an Oracle employee manning the booth:

Optimized for lower-value data, Infiniband to move data around node-to-node, Infiniband to move data machine to machine, Not shared disk, Each node pre-configured to run hadoop and Oracle NoSQL, There is nothing that can be done on this machine that couldn't happen on Exadata faster, its a matter of cost

It looks more like a virtualization work load machine (aka VCE vBlock or Dell vStarter) than their existing servers.

Price is a real key here (otherwise, just use Exadata for this sort of workload) and there is no announced pricing.  The upper-end of likely pricing would be set by the Exadata expansion server - 750K/rack.  The lower-end would be set by commodity hw approaches which I estimate around 350K/rack (Dell, CorAid.)  I'd assume pricing will vary wildly depending on what else you are buying and how your rep is doing with his quarter...

Shared Disk vs. Shared Nothing - Exadata and OpenSource SW support

Danial Abadi did a nice overview of the issues involved with Exadata and shared disk vs. shared nothing last year.

Oracles Hadoop loader does a nifty trick.  If the HDFS nodes are on Oracle's HW, then Oracle can read directly in - faster than parallel block load.  I wouldn't be surprised if they played the

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Oracle Big Data Strategy

Oracle's Andy Mendelsohn, SVP of the Server group, laid out his vision for Big Data at Oracle yesterday. The use of Big Data in Oracle's vision is to enhance decision support.  This contrasts greatly with some of the  common uses of big data which support social networking or personalization. 

First, some definitions...commonly used words don't necessarily mean the same to Oracle as many others have used them.

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Oracle Exalytics - underwhelming for non Essbase users...

Engineered HW running Hyperion and TimesTen for folks running Hyperion planning applications, Essbase or TimesTen custom apps. Can't really see what else there is to it.

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An interesting Anti-cloud argument from Anthony Lye of Oracle

Anthony Lye did a great briefing on BI and CRM that just wrapped up. 

One of the discussions was around key industries + applications that really couldn't utilize the cloud.

His argument went as follows:

• Retail POS (or mobile) needs to run tra

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