Oracle’s Timeline, Copious Benchmarks And Internal Deployments Prove Exadata Is The Worlds First (Best?) OLTP Machine – Part 1.5

In Part I of this series about Oracle OLTP/ERP on Exadata versus non-Exadata, I took a moment to point out the inaccuracies of a particular piece of Oracle marketing literature. In a piece aimed at chronicling Oracle Corporation history, the marketing department went way out of line by making the following claim regarding Exadata:

[...] wins benchmarks against key competitors [..]

Please don’t get me wrong, those five words appearing in any random sentence wouldn’t pose any sort of  a problem. However, situated as they are in this particular sentence does create a  problem because the statement is utterly false.  Exadata has not won a single benchmark against any competitor–”key” or otherwise.

Along For The Ride
In Part I of this series I pointed out the fact HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server cells (a.k.a., V1 Exadata) were used in this June 2009 HP BladeSystem 1-TB Scale TPC-H. However, merely involving Exadata hardware can hardly support Oracle’s marketing claim vis a vis winning benchmarks against key competitors.

There is a big difference between being involved in a benchmark and being the technology that contributes to the result.

I made it clear, in Part I, that Exadata storage was used in that 2009 HP TPC-H result but none of the Exadata features contributed to the result. I clarified that assertion by pointing out that the particular benchmark in question was an In-memory Parallel Query result. Since the result establish Oracle database performance achieved through in-memory database processing I didn’t feel compelled to shore up my assertion. I didn’t think anyone would be confused over the fact that in-memory database processing is not improved by storage technology.

I was wrong.

In the comment section of Part I a comment by a blog reader took offense at my audacious claim. Indeed, how could I assert that storage is not a relevant component in achieving good in-memory database processing benchmark results. The reader stated:

You give reference to a TPHC that used Exadata and then say no Exadata features were used. [..] You obviously don’t know what you are talking about

Having seen that I began to suspect there may be other readers confused on the matter so I let the comment through moderation and decided to address the confusion it in this post.

So now it’s time to address the reader’s comment. If Exadata is used in a benchmark, but Exadata Storage Server offload processing is disabled, would one consider that an Exadata benchmark or was Exadata merely along for the ride?

Here is a screenshot of the full disclosure report that shows Exadata storage intelligence (offload processing) features were disabled. For this reason I assert that Exadata has never won a benchmark against “competitors”, neither “key” nor otherwise.

The screenshot:

Filed under: Oracle Database Machine, Oracle performance, Oracle TPC-H, Oracle11g, Oracle11g RAC