Oracle has stepped into what it sees as a void in the marketplace, with a new database technology that claims to address the data-overload issue, by allowing organisations to maintain availability, reliability, and integrity of their data, while also being able to scale the solution to cater for future demand.
Oracle's 9i Database with Real Application Clusters (RAC), released earlier this year, is slowly but surely gaining maturity and market share, according to Oracle representatives, customers and industry analysts alike, company executives have told delegates at Oracle Open World 2001 in San Francisco.
At the centre of its release is the issue of clustering, which, according to Michael Capellas, chairman and CEO of Compaq Computer Corporation, is the 'next big thing'.
According to Capellas, clustering can be broadly defined as the ability to take multiple nodes, or sections of data, and tie them together. This enables organisations to take advantage of the performance of the entire complex, as opposed to being constrained by the performance of individual nodes.
According to Capellas, within three years, clustering will be highly prevalent.
"I think that in three years you will see fifty percent of all databases clustered together because we need better correlation of the data...we have to drive much better throughput performance," said Capellas.
However, the path to widespread usage will not be completely smooth, according to Capellas. He sees two main barriers to adoption, those of a perceived complexity and a poor understanding of the economic benefits. While he believes both points can be countered, he has stated this will be a result of educating future users and customers, alike.
"I would argue that tonnes and tonnes of distributed nodes may be more complex to administer. And I think we have not yet done a good job of talking about how the benefits of clustering make the complex easier, allows you to scale on the fly, and [that] the performance really can be there from an economic point of view", said Capellas.
Capellas believes there is enormous scope for clustering to be used in commercial applications, and pointed to supercomputing systems as examples of how it can actually work.
"The clustering world really grew up in supercomputing, when we had these unbelievably complex problems to solve," Capellas explained. " Supercomputing clustering of nodes is now finding uses in the commercial applications world".
Capellas cited Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing as one example of a supercomputing centre using clustering to drive real-time commercial applications, in this case, pattern discovery for fraud detection.
The release of Oracle 9i Database and its Real Application Clustering technology signals an attempt to drive the adoption of clustering technology in all-sized organisations.
Oracle 'RACs' up database market-share
Carl Olofson, program director at IDC, said the release was a substantial development, and was likely to contribute to the IDC-forecasted "double digit growth" of the database market through to 2005.
"Technology such as this is likely to drive growth through to 2005 in the overall database market," said Olofson.
At the moment, Oracle's database technology is unmatched in the transaction-based segment of the database market.
Olofson said the main competitors in the space, IBMs DB2 and Informix and NCRs Terradata are "shared-nothing systems" that are more suited to data warehousing needs than transaction-based databasing.
The DB2, Informix and Terradata systems divide data into units and share data across the units, allowing one node, or unit, the responsibility of one section of data. This leads to scalability issues as well as "data skew" problems, according to Olofson.
Oracle claims to solve these challenges and increase performance and reliability through its RAC technology, featuring near-linear scalability and reliability for applications. Oracle 9i database also purports to provide transparent application scalability by sharing frequently accessed data across all applications in a cluster.
Olofson said the Oracle 9i database lends itself to deployment for systems that need scalability, high availability and are processing random updates to data.
CERN 'accelerates' Oracle 9i RAC deployment
One organisation already taking advantage of the Oracle 9i Database RAC technology, is CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research).
CERN is utilising the capabilities of the Oracle 9i database for its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project. LHC is a particle accelerator project which is expected to generate pentabytes of data during its life-span--an amount which well exceeds current capabilities of relational database technology, and requires a thousand times the computing power needed at CERN, today.
According to Jamie Shiers, database group manager at CERN, the RAC technology allows CERN a "realistic, low risk route to coping with the staggering storage requirements of the LHC."
Oracle 9i RAC enables CERN to meet storage data requirements using commodity hardware, thereby capitalising on the low-risk factors and cost-savings associated with mainstream technologies, according to Shiers.
Another benefit was the ease of installation and integration of the technology in the CERN environment. Shiers said the process took "only a few hours" and was "very simple".
CERN intends to monitor the performance of the RAC technology very closely throughout the next few years to judge efficiency and return on investment.
Utilising 9i RAC technology may present one challenge in particular for CERN, according to Shiers--that of security. Given Oracle's profile and prominence in the database market, CERN is concerned that using Oracle technology may expose the LHC project to security breaches, such as malicious attacks and denial of service attacks.
"The one downside about going with very well-known solutions is that you are much more open to attack. Everyone at home can just play so there is much more chance that someone will try to break in," said Shiers.
Nicole Bellamy travelled to Oracle Open World in San Francisco as a guest of Oracle.
I think really RAc is going to be the predominent database solution for big firms. the high Availability feature of RAc looks to work fantastic.