Exadata-technical-whitepaper-134575

An Oracle White Paper April 2011

A Technical Overview of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server

Oracle White Paper— A Technical Overview of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server

Disclaimer
The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into anycontract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Oracle White Paper— A Technical Overview of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Exadata Storage ServerIntroduction ......................................................................................... 2  Exadata Product Family ...................................................................... 4  Exadata Database Machine ............................................................ 4  Exadata Storage Server .................................................................. 8  ExadataDatabase Machine Architecture .......................................... 12  Database Server Software ............................................................ 14  Exadata Storage Server Software ................................................. 16  Exadata Smart Scan Processing .................................................. 16  Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression....................................... 20  I/O Resource Management With Exadata ..................................... 21  Quality of Service (QoS) Management with Exadata .................... 22  Conclusion ........................................................................................ 28 

Oracle White Paper— A Technical Overview of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server

IntroductionThe Oracle Exadata Database Machine is an easy to deploy solution for hosting the Oracle Database that delivers the highest levels of database performance available. The Exadata Database Machine is a “cloud in a box” composed of database servers, Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, an InfiniBand fabric for storage networking and all the other components required to host an Oracle Database. It deliversoutstanding I/O and SQL processing performance for online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and consolidation of mixed workloads. Extreme performance is delivered for all types of database applications by leveraging a massively parallel grid architecture using Real Application Clusters and Exadata storage. Database Machine and Exadata storage delivers breakthrough performancewith linear I/O scalability, is simple to use and manage, and delivers mission-critical availability and reliability. The Exadata Storage Server is an integral component of the Exadata Database Machine. Extreme performance is delivered by several features of the product. Exadata storage provides database aware storage services, such as the ability to offload database processing from the databaseserver to storage, and provides this while being transparent to SQL processing and database applications. Hence just the data requested by the application is returned rather than all the data in the queried tables. Exadata Smart Flash Cache dramatically accelerates Oracle Database processing by speeding I/O operations. The Flash provides intelligent caching of database objects to avoid physical I/Ooperations. The Oracle Database on the Database Machine is the first Flash enabled database. Exadata storage provides an advanced compression technology, Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression, that typically provides 10x, and higher, levels of data compression. Exadata compression boosts the effective data transfer by an order of magnitude. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the world's most...