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Friday, October 14, 2011

OpenWorld Database General Session and Exalytics

The Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine (White Paper), announced at the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, was also featured in Andy Mendelsohn's (Senior Vice President, Oracle Database Server Technologies) Database General Session. This is also the session where Andy Mendelsohn showcased the Oracle Big Data Appliance, "an engineered system optimized for acquiring, organizing and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database 11g.".

Also see my previous posts:
Here are screenshots from the Database session:


Do take a minute to read this disclaimer, since this pertains to future functionality.


The software consists of the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database, the secret-sauce, so to say, that enables the in-memory capabilities of Exalytics. TimesTen is the market leading in-memory database solution. Exalytics is also tightly integrated with and can connect to an Oracle Exadata machine via Infiniband. The software foundation, of course, is the market leading analytics suite, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite (informally known as OBIEE).

40 Intel processor cores, 1TB RAM, and an ultra high-speed 40Gb Infiniband connection to Oracle Exadata.


This is Jacques Vigeant, currently my manager, demonstrating Exalytics in the session. Ultra industrial-scale Master-detail linking is just one of the ingredients here. Another of the features I wrote about and defined as a product manager. Others being advanced data visualizations, and mobile analytics. Feels good :-)


Geo-spatial visualizations in the Exalytics demo. Zoom into the Map View. This particular example shows store locations in the city of San Francisco. The map data has been provided by NAVTEQ.


You can add or remove formats from the Map View, with a mouse-click. Color-code by quartiles, quintiles, deciles, or any other arbitrary number of bins. Select from percentile binning, value binning, or even continuous fill bins. Choose variable shaped markers, or pie graph or bar graph overlays. Even use images as markers.

Monday, October 03, 2011

Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine in Thomas Kurian's Keynote


The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.
The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.


Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Product Development at Oracle, showcased the newly launched Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine at his Oracle OpenWorld keynote.



Dramatic improvements with Exalytics, including 20X better response time, 80X faster MOLAP reads, and 15X better response times for Planning applications.


A new in-memory cache that is services by the TimesTen database. An adaptive cache algorithm that ensures that frequently accessed data is kept in-memory, thereby reducing or altogether eliminating Database hits.
The first screenshot above, in the top row, is that of Map Views - geo-spatial visualizations in the OBIEE 11g suite; the second is a new type of Scorecard visualization, known as the Strategy Wheel; the third is a screenshot from the BI Mobile app running an OBIEE Dashboard page; and the fourth is showcasing a new Trellis multi-panel visualization.

Enhancements and new capabilities in the Essbase MOLAP engine to take advantage of Exalytics.

Dave Granholm doing a demo of Exalytics.

Master-detail linking allows for in-Dashboard analysis, instantaneous updates of content on your Dashboard. 

Close to a BILLION records are analyzed. Prompts that refresh at the speed of thought. Search-as-you-type capabilities.
Microcharts, aka Sparklines, in their myriad forms: whether as sparkbars or sparklines, with highlighting of low and high values help visualize in an understandable manner massive amounts of data within the small confines of a single screen.


A close-up of a line graph souped up with master-detail linking.

Start at any level of aggregation.

Drill down any path, across the row or column edge of the view to drill to a deeper level of insight.


Each sparkline cell in the Trellis view is serving up tens even hundreds of data points. Multiply by a dozen rows and dozen or more columns and you are truly talking about meaningful dense data visualizations.

I need to have access to this same dashboard as I leave the office and bring out my iPad.

Adding this Dashboard as a Favorite means it is easier to access.

Like from my BI Mobile iPad app. With a consistent user-interface that is nonetheless optimized for a multi-touch gestural interface that is provided in the Apple iPad tablet.


More information, including a BI Mobile app demo in Balaji's general session.


Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.
The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Here's some information on the "Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine" that was announced by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at its conference, Oracle OpenWorld, in San Francisco.

  • "The Exalytics machine includes 40 processor cores and 1TB of DRAM, but can hold five to 10TB of data in memory thanks to compression, Ellison said." (link)
  • "It runs a software stack that includes parallelized versions of Oracle's TimesTen in-memory database, BI (business intelligence) stack and Essbase OLAP (online analytical processing) server, Ellison revealed." (link)
  • 4 x 10 Core Intel Xeom CPUs (slide from Larry Ellison's keynote)
  • H/W Scan rate of 200 Gigabytes per second (slide from Larry Ellison's keynote)
  • The industry's first in-memory BI machine
  • Best-in-class enterprise BI platform, in-memory analytics software, and hardware optimized to work together
  • Advanced data visualization and exploration to quickly provide actionable insight from large amounts of data
  • "The Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation running on Oracle Exalytics features a number of enhancements including mobile enablement of existing dashboards and reports, native look and feel, better interactivity support, ability to bookmark and save reports and dashboards for offline interactive viewing etc." (from the White Paper)
  • ..supports optimum SQL generation for Oracle Exadata.
Oracle Exalytics Trellis Charts View provide better visual data discovery
As a historical sidenote, I had written the PRD on Trellis views some time back - it felt terrific to see these visualizations in action.

Press coverage
Exalytics, a high-end server appliance for near-real-time business intelligence applications and a big part of Oracle’s big data response, debuted Sunday night at Oracle OpenWorld 2011.

The Exalytics machine includes 40 processor cores and 1TB of DRAM, but can hold five to 10TB of data in memory thanks to compression, Ellison said.
It runs a software stack that includes parallelized versions of Oracle's TimesTen in-memory database, BI (business intelligence) stack and Essbase OLAP (online analytical processing) server, Ellison revealed.

“Everything runs faster if you keep it in DRAM -- if you keep it in main memory,” Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said in a keynote address at a conference in San Francisco tonight. “You ask more questions, you get better answers.”
The Exalytics Intelligence Machine Ellison introduced will run Oracle’s Times Ten and Essbase databases, both gained through past acquisitions, in its terabyte of main memory.

Screenshots from the keynote:
The slide announcing Exalytics

The software underpinnings of Exalytics: OBIEE, TimesTen, Essbase.




Speed-of-thought analytics; Trellis views, instant prompts refreshes

Heuristic Adaptive In-Memory Cache




Performance graphs of Exalytics; average response time improvement: 18X




Average response time improvement with Exadata Oracle Database data source: 23X





In summary

And here's the video replay of the CEO keynote: