Oracle, Sun speed-launch Exadata V2 • The Register

A timely snapshot of the Oracle/Sun news; see the full article for more details.

So, in sum: Exadata V1 is for data warehousing, Exadata V2 is for data warehousing or OLTP. Unlike all of those specialized data warehousing products sold by Teradata and Netezza or the in-memory OLTP database appliances that venture capitalists, according to Ellison, may be sorry they invested in.

While this may be technically true, there is no reason why the new storage servers embedded in the Exadata V2 product can't be hooked up to other x64 or RISC/Unix servers running the Oracle database and RAC extensions. And if Oracle wanted to, it could use other storage products with flash and do all kinds of optimizations to get data moving back and forth fast enough to support OLTP as well as data warehousing workloads.

If Oracle does indeed succeed in buying Sun - and that is almost a certainty - it seems highly unlikely that such optimizations will be done on non-Oracle iron. Right up until the minute that HP starts partnering with IBM and Microsoft to do similar optimizations to take advantage of flash with their databases.

Oracle, Sun speed-launch Exadata V2 • The Register