Oracle CEO Larry Ellison presented the  Exadata Database Machine Version 2 yesterday which combines data warehouse and OLTP (online transaction processing).  It’s been declared the fastest machine in the world for both DWH and OLTP (twice as fast as Version 1 for data warehousing).  I expected that Oracle would leverage Sun’s technology perhaps a year from now following the Oracle-Sun acquisition, but already?  September 2009?  Given their long-standing partnership I should not have been surprised. This is definitely exciting news and for the CEO/CFO/CIO and business managers of innovative companies looking to solve today’s analytic problems this should come as good news.  For me, I’ve been waiting for some amazing hardware to compliment Oracle’s database performance features and it has finally happened.  With Exadata, experienced Oracle and Unix administrator won’t have to worry about special propriety training and management that’s necessary with some of the other appliance vendor’s solutions out there.

With Version 2 of Exadata your not limited to a data warehouse configuration; your existing Oracle OLTP applications will work as well (without changes).  I am pretty sure the other data warehouse appliance guys hear it often from some of their potential customers: “What?  It costs a million dollars and I can’t run my ERP on it?” Not the case with Exadata version 2.  Oracle will be smart to price it lower than the other appliance vendors and it appears they have.  Outside of cost, real performance test results will be the proof and the reason to buy.

Clients need to be able to test their existing apps to see performance improvements without having to re-write anything if their apps are in Oracle already.  This would make it simple to perform performance and load testing with just a copy of their current data and a pointer change in the app server.  The benefit could be seen while the Exadata is on loan to the client to prototype on.

My only concern is the current color of the box. I think a mix of Sun purple and Oracle red mix would have created a nice plum color. Plum?  Well… perhaps not.  But tan colored hardware is a little boring.  Netezza has the cool green against black.  But since these boxes sit in lonely cold data center so the color probably does not matter much.