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Monday, October 03, 2011

Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine

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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: