Let’s all pause for a moment to admire Exadata

Before we all rush off to spend time with friends and family during the holidays, I want to take a moment to look back and appreciate a move that Oracle made over a decade ago. It’s a move I see paying dividends for our customers today and for a long time to come.?

That farsighted move was to bring the Oracle database development and hardware teams together to design and build a machine to run the Oracle Database at peak efficiency and ultra-high availability.?

Back then, the idea was to give customers an elegant way to speed up queries that require large data scans, a task fraught with potential bottlenecks. Before Exadata, I spent hours on whiteboards with customers juggling the number of CPUs, controllers, and physical disks to arrive at a balanced hardware configuration that could deliver the performance they needed.

Once Exadata arrived, it became a no-brainer: Just order a quarter rack, half rack, or full rack based on the sheer size of your workloads, and you’re good. It's balanced and available, and you'll get the full throughput you need. The hardware is designed specifically to scale out with database workloads. The compute, storage and networking are optimized for these workloads.??

That all-in-one-machine performance came from the close working relationship between teams. If the members of that joint team know exactly what the database Call does, they can process that on the storage tier and send back only the necessary information in a format that the database can easily consume. The magic comes from knowing both parts.?

Over time, that close working relationship and shared expertise have created performance-enhancing software that automates and accelerates OLTP, consolidated workloads, and data analytics.?

The business results have been astounding. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine runs in almost 90% of?Fortune?500 companies, according to IDC. Financial institutions use it to process billions of transactions and identify fraud in real-time. Manufacturers use it to monitor sensor-equipped supplies and stock in factories and warehouses. Utilities?with multiple petabytes of smart-meter data use Oracle Exadata to reduce the cost of their analytics?environment. Large enterprises and governments use it to consolidate database operations on less?infrastructure to lower their costs. Many of these organizations aren’t shy about?sharing what the platform does for them. I joke that Exadata is a bit like those ubiquitous Otis elevators and escalators: If they ever stopped working, the world would be in a heck of a lot of trouble.?

Where you want it

It speaks volumes that we've chosen to run so much of our Oracle Cloud Infrastructure on this platform. Oracle Exadata and Exadata Cloud Service are?simply the best places to run Oracle Database and Oracle Autonomous Database. In addition, we offer Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, which lets companies and organizations access all the benefits of our public cloud infrastructure inside their own data centers, with the same cloud simplicity, agility, and pay-per-use pricing.

Deutsche Bank?is using Exadata Cloud@Customer to consolidate petabytes of data onto a newer release of the Oracle Database. It gives the German bank a platform that supports all data types and data models—such as JSON, XML, graph, text, IoT, and blockchain—for building modern, customer-centric applications. Exadata Cloud@Customer also gives users ready access to Oracle Application Express (APEX), our popular?low-code development platform.?

When you buy an Exadata, you can trust that we engineered and built it, and we tested it soup to nuts. It’s the platform we run our own business on, so we’ve really hardened it. Compare that to building your own,?spinning up hardware infrastructure on someone’s cloud, and manually installing software on top of that.?You're getting the hardware from one vendor, the software from another, and the clusterware from yet another. Now you're on the hook as the integrator. You're on the hook to do all the patching. And when something goes wrong, watch as all those vendors point fingers at each other.?

Sure, you can get Oracle Database as a service from Amazon, but they don't offer all the high-availability features that we provide with Exadata. There's no RAC, no multitenant, no Active Data Guard. Amazon and other cloud vendors are also scrambling to offer?on-premises versions of their cloud services, like Exadata Cloud@Customer. But those aren’t even close to the complete deal,?according to analysts.?

We've been in this game a much longer time. Leveraging uncommonly close relationships between our hardware and software teams, we have been optimizing Exadata for the database as it evolves, step by step, for well over a decade. The results of that work still astound me.

I hope you and yours have a safe and healthy holiday season, and I look forward to engaging more with all of you in 2022!?