Business Insights

OOW2011 : More on Oracle Exalytics

Mark Rittman

• 2 min read

I'm currently sitting in the Thomas Kurian keynote at Oracle Openworld 2011 in San Francisco, and more details of the Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine have now been announced. Here's the latest details:

The Exalytics BI Machine is based on a Sun server with 4 Intel Xeon E7-4800 series processors each with 10 cores, for a total of 40 cores. The server has 1TB of RAM and local direct-attach disks with 3.6TB of raw storage, and is designed to hook up to data sources such as Oracle, Teradata, Microsoft and IBM databases, plus Oracle's own Exadata platform. Exalytics is made up of three main components:

  1. A new version of OBIEE 11g that comes with an updated user interface to allow dense analysis of data using new micro-charts, dashboard prompts that work immediately rather than requiring you to press "Go" buttons
  2. A special version of the TimesTen database that features in-memory, columnar compression, and
  3. A special version of Essbase, that comes with parallel load and query optimizations together with optimizations to store more blocks in memory (making it likely in my mind it's a new variant on Block Storage Option Essbase)

TimesTen has had a number of improvements compared to the release that's out now. The columnar compression I think is new (and makes it a similar proposition to Microsoft's PowerPivot product), and TmesTen will work in conjunction with the new release of OBIEE to recommend and then store in TimesTen commonly-used aggregates, which can then be used by OBIEE to speed-up queries.

Essbase also has three innovations in this product:

  • Something referred to as a Smart Storage Manager, that stores frequently-accessed data in-memory to avoid reading and writing to disk
  • An in-memory cache to optimize block access, and
  • A distributed lock manager which will improve parallelism within Essbase

In terms of the new user interface, the main change seems to be the implementation of dense visualizations using grids of micro-charts.

The idea here is to pack large amounts of information into a single screen, allowing you to analyze terabytes of data with TimesTen and Essbase doing the heavy-lifting in terms of aggregates.

No details were given around pricing, or availability of the software and hardware. Oracle have made some information now on the Oracle website, which can be accessed here:

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