Database Systems Journal vol. II, no. 4/2011 3 Oracle Exalytics: Engineered for Speed-of-Thought Analytics Gabriela GLIGOR, Silviu TEODORU Oracle Romania [email protected]; [email protected] One of the biggest product announcements at 2011's Oracle OpenWorld user conference was Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, the latest addition to the "Exa"-branded suite of Oracle-Sun engineered software-hardware systems. Analytics is all about gaining insights from the data for better decision making. However, the vision of delivering fast, interactive, insightful analytics has remained elusive for most organizations. Most enterprise IT organizations continue to struggle to deliver actionable analytics due to time-sensitive, sprawling requirements and ever tightening budgets. The issue is further exasperated by the fact that most enterprise analytics solutions require dealing with a number of hardware, software, storage and networking vendors and precious resources are wasted integrating the hardware and software components to deliver a complete analytical solution. Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine is the world’s first engineered system specifically designed to deliver high performance analysis, modeling and planning. Built using industry-standard hardware, market-leading business intelligence software and in- memory database technology, Oracle Exalytics is an optimized system that delivers answers to all your business questions with unmatched speed, intelligence, simplicity and manageability. Keywords: engineered system, Business Intelligence, analytics, OLAP, architecture Introduction almost instantaneously. Oracle claims that 1 The primary design principle of Oracle the algorithmic speed of the system means Exalytics is to enable fast and easy ad hoc it can respond to queries as they are being analysis across large end-user communities typed – which is, in many ways, similar to using an in-memory processing engine. how Google offers suggested searches Speed of thought and instant response are based on a partially typed phrase [1]. the hallmarks of its functionality, making it What exactly is Oracle Exalytics? It is the highly applicable to a range of ad hoc, latest addition to Oracle's "Exa"- branded what-if analysis and forecasting and family of pre-engineered software- realtime planning applications. hardware systems – in which the company The in-memory capabilities are key to integrates its software on its own hardware. enabling what Oracle calls a highly Now that Oracle has its own line of interactive and visual analytic experience hardware (through the acquisition of Sun), for end users. Oracle claims that Exalytics it appears to have fully embraced the introduces a new user interface designed to "engineered systems" model as a way to handle end-user queries "at the speed of sell both hardware and software while thought." Peeling away the marketing maintaining higher margins. Oracle speak, this means the product is designed Exalytics' immediate "engineered" siblings to trawl through dense data sets (regardless currently include the Exalogic Elastic of query, location, and device type and Cloud middleware machine, the Exadata including desktops, laptops, tablets, and Database Machine, and the Oracle SPARC even smartphones) and provide results 4 Oracle Exalytics: Engineered for Speed-of-Thought Analytics SuperCluster T4-4 general-purpose servers enterprise-grade BI query, analysis, [2]. reporting, dashboarding, and other visualizations). Most, if not all, of these 2 Oracle Exalytics Architecture software products have been modified to Although Oracle Exalytics is a new run in-parallel and in-memory data- product, the architecture is built on processing architectures. All of these several existing Oracle products (Figure combine to deliver query optimization, 1): parallelized versions of its TimesTen complex multidimensional analysis and in-memory database and Oracle Essbase planning calculations, and enterprise- OLAP Server (a specialized in-memory wide BI scale, respectively, through a version), together with an optimized revamped user interface that is designed version of the Oracle BI Foundation for “speed-of-thought” analytics [1],[3]. Suite (OBI EE 11g for standard TimesTen for Exalytics 1 TB RAM Essbase 40 Processing Cores High Speed Networking Adaptive In-Memory Tools In-Memory Analytics In-Memory Analytics Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite Software Hardware Figure 1. Oracle Exalytics Components The Oracle Exalytics hardware is cores providing a total of 40 cores for delivered in units of a single 3RU rack- computation. The compute power is mountable server that is optimally matched with 1TB of memory to provide configured for in-memory analytics for sufficient capacity for in-memory business intelligence workloads. analytics. Multiple Oracle Exalytics machines can A high-performance business be clustered together to expand available intelligence system requires fast memory capacity and to provide high connectivity to data warehouses, availability. Oracle Exalytics includes operational systems and other data powerful compute capacity, abundant sources. Besides, high-speed network memory, and fast networking options connectivity is also required to create and is capable of direct attached storage clusters which deliver high availability, options. load balancing and disaster recovery. Oracle Exalytics is powered by four Intel Oracle Exalytics provides the following Xeon© E7-4800 series processors and network interfaces to support the above features high-speed interconnect requirements[1]: technology between processors and I/O. • InfiniBand: Two quad-data rate Each processor supports 10 compute (QDR) 40 GB/s InfiniBand ports Database Systems Journal vol. II, no. 4/2011 5 are available with each machine provide exclusive features on Oracle expressly for Oracle Exadata (only Exalytics hardware [1]. database machine that provides The Oracle Business Intelligence extreme performance for both data Foundation delivers the most complete, warehousing and online transaction open, and integrated business intelligence processing (OLTP) applications) platform on the market today. The Oracle BI connectivity. When connected to Foundation provides comprehensive and Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics complete capabilities for business becomes an integral part of the intelligence, including enterprise reporting, Oracle Exadata private InfiniBand dashboards, ad hoc analysis, multi- network and has high-speed, low dimensional OLAP, scorecards, and latency access to the database predictive analytics on an integrated servers. When multiple Oracle platform. Exalytics machines are clustered The Oracle BI Foundation includes the together, the InfiniBand fabric also industry’s best-in-class server technology serves as the high-speed cluster for relational and multi-dimensional analysis interconnect. and delivers rich end user experience that • 10 GB Ethernet: Two 10 GB/s includes visualization, collaboration, alerts Ethernet ports are available for and notifications, search and mobile access. connecting to enterprise data Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database sources and for client access. (TimesTen) is a proven memory-optimized full-featured relational database with • 1 GB Ethernet: Four 1 GB/s persistence. TimesTen stores all its data in Ethernet ports are available for memory optimized data structures and client access. supports query algorithms specifically • Dedicated Integrated Lights Out designed for in-memory processing. Using Management (ILOM): Ethernet port the familiar SQL programming interfaces, for complete remote management. TimesTen provides real-time data All network interfaces support failover and management that delivers blazing-fast can be used to setup a cluster without a response times, and very high throughput for single point of failure. Oracle Exalytics a variety of workloads. also includes redundant hot-swappable Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for power supplies and fans. Exalytics, based on Oracle TimesTen In- Oracle Exalytics includes a high- Memory Database, has been specifically performance direct attached storage system enhanced for analytical processing at in- including a high-performance RAID HBA memory speeds. and 3.6TBs of raw disk capacity. Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Optionally, clusters of Oracle Exalytics Exalytics supports columnar compression machines can leverage network attached that reduces the memory footprint for in- storage for storing shared metadata and memory data. Compression ratios of 5X are configuration data. practical and help expand in-memory capacity. Analytic algorithms are designed 3 Oracle Exalytics Software to operate directly on compressed data, thus Oracle Exalytics runs the Oracle Business further speeding up the in-memory analytics Intelligence Foundation along with Oracle queries. TimesTen In-Memory Database for Oracle Essbase is the industry leading Exalytics. Both BI Foundation and multi-dimensional OLAP Server for analytic TimesTen In-Memory Database for applications. For Oracle Exalytics, Oracle Exalytics have been specifically enhanced to Essbase has a number of optimizations for work together and have been optimized to in-memory operation including 6 Oracle Exalytics: Engineered for Speed-of-Thought Analytics improvements to overall storage layer performance, enhancements to parallel 4. The Complementary Roles of Oracle operations, enhanced MDX syntax and a Exalytics and Oracle Exadata high performance MDX query engine. The