{"id":21222,"date":"2022-12-06T05:32:17","date_gmt":"2022-12-06T05:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/12\/06\/exadata-and-mysql-enhancements-highlight-oracles-renewed-impact-on-the-it-conversation\/"},"modified":"2022-12-06T05:32:17","modified_gmt":"2022-12-06T05:32:17","slug":"exadata-and-mysql-enhancements-highlight-oracles-renewed-impact-on-the-it-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/12\/06\/exadata-and-mysql-enhancements-highlight-oracles-renewed-impact-on-the-it-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Exadata and MySQL enhancements highlight Oracle’s renewed impact on the IT conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It may have been around since Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, but one of the longest-tenured database companies in the world is determined to demonstrate its continued relevance in the IT community.<\/p>\n

Oracle Corp. unveiled\u00a0its first relational database written in assembly language and running on 128K of memory<\/a> in 1978. Now, after 45 years<\/a> in the IT business, Oracle is seeking to transform the database market again through a combination of\u00a0\u00a0enhancements to the Oracle Exadata X9M<\/a> platform and the introduction of MySQL HeatWave.<\/a><\/p>\n

The company\u2019s latest moves are also\u00a0creating a tailwind for Oracle\u2019s balance sheet, leading to positive, more consistent revenue numbers for the database giant, after a rocky few years in which the firm was viewed as late<\/a> to the cloud computing party. Oracle reported solid results<\/a> in its first fiscal quarter, with cloud infrastructure revenue up 58% year-over-year and cloud application revenue gaining 48%.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe Oracle\u2019s recent enhancements to the Exadata and MySQL HeatWave product lines are boosting its financial performance across key financial metrics,\u201d said Ron Westfall<\/a>, senior analyst and research director at Futurum Research, in an interview for this story. \u201cI see Oracle\u2019s focus on enabling multi-cloud access to Oracle database solutions as broadening and accelerating market acceptance of the company\u2019s cloud database offerings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Partnership with AMD<\/h3>\n

Contributing to Oracle\u2019s rising market clout is a highly differentiated strategy to integrate hardware and software innovation in its database offerings.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s recent enhancements<\/a> to Exadata X9M, its signature OLTP or online transaction processing database, boosted processing power through chipsets supplied from a collaboration<\/a> with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Oracle has teamed up with the chipmaker to leverage EPYC processor technology and extend the capabilities of the enterprise database.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpeed and memory are really important for OLTP,\u201d said David Floyer<\/a>, CTO and co-founder of SiliconANGLE\u2019s research division Wikibon, in an interview for this story. \u201cAMD chips also achieve greater bandwidth, so it wins on all three.\u201d<\/p>\n

AMD has built an extensive relationship with Oracle over the years. The company has teamed with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure group on several occasions<\/a> to integrate EPYC processors as part of Oracle\u2019s Cloud Compute E4 platform and extend the capabilities for Oracle Linux.<\/p>\n

The partnership with Oracle has bolstered the narrative<\/a> surrounding AMD\u2019s emergence as an alternative x86 supplier. The firm\u2019s processors have helped Oracle\u2019s recent performance advances in its Exadata X9M, along with other enhancements in its product line.<\/p>\n

\u201cAMD is a key Oracle supplier and partner today due to fundamentals such as Oracle Cloud E4 VMs powered by AMD EPYC processors can now deliver up to 30% better performance than the previous generation,\u201d Westfall said. \u201cThe expanding use of AMD EPYC processors enables Oracle to offer OCI E4 Dense Compute Instances and Oracle Cloud VMware platforms to hybrid cloud environments which gives customers more flexibility by allowing them to tailor their workloads to 32-, 64-, or 128-core configurations. The AMD relationship is allowing Oracle to deliver performance and flexibility breakthroughs to customers that are critical to winning more mind and market share across the increasingly competitive cloud space.\u201d<\/p>\n

R&D pays off<\/h3>\n

Oracle is also demonstrating an ability to translate increased investment in research and development into tangible advances for its products. The firm\u2019s R&D spending<\/a> has grown from $1.5 billion in 2005 to $7.2 billion in 2022.<\/p>\n

A prime example of how Oracle\u2019s R&D spending is paying off can be seen in the progress of MySQL HeatWave. Oracle\u00a0introduced<\/a> HeatWave, a database service for transactional processing, analytics and machine learning workloads, in December of 2020. The company has made a number of enhancements to it since, including the addition<\/a> of machine learning based automation features and increases<\/a> in the amount of data that can be processed.<\/p>\n

In September, Oracle expanded HeatWave\u2019s footprint in the cloud through a new agreement<\/a> with Amazon Web Services Inc. that optimized it for AWS infrastructure.<\/p>\n

\u201cHeatWave is outstanding, Oracle has a tremendous quality of leadership and engineers in the development group, and they have been working together a long time,\u201d Floyer said. \u201cThe target market for HeatWave is to be the leading vendor in real time analytics integrated with a transaction system. The value of that is difficult to underestimate, as it allows enterprises new ways of thinking about how to do business.\u201d<\/p>\n

Benchmarking performance<\/h3>\n

Those new ways of thinking about business have materialized through HeatWave\u2019s ability to generate exceptional cost\/performance advantages in enterprise production environments. Documentation of this has been facilitated by Oracle\u2019s publishing of TCP-H benchmarks on publicly available sites such as GitHub<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The results based on these benchmarks have been significant. In an independent evaluation<\/a> for Wikibon by research analyst Marc Staimer<\/a>, Oracle\u2019s MySQL HeatWave was 69% to 86% less costly when measured against AWS, Snowflake, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. And it was 15x to 73x better in TCO\/performance in a benchmark comparison with the same four firms.<\/p>\n

Oracle has managed to separate itself from rivals in the MySQL space through a focus on creating competitive advantages in natively supported features such as machine learning, according to Futurum\u2019s Westfall.<\/p>\n

\u201cI see HeatWave ML attaining solid differentiation across a wide range of top cloud database services selection criteria that strengthen competitive advantages across key features,\u201d Westfall said. \u201cThese selection criteria include self-tuning, training time, pause & resume, costs, and other solution-wide enhancements. Now HeatWave ML natively supports AutoML, including integration and completion criteria capabilities, as well as intelligent sampling, which I believe rivals currently cannot match on a price\/performance or native support basis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oracle\u2019s positioning of its database technology reflects an understanding<\/a> that not every customer will move applications and data to its cloud infrastructure. Multicloud reality has set in and the company\u2019s willingness to provide access to its database products on Microsoft Azure<\/a> and AWS<\/a> is having a net positive affect on financial performance as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cOracle is fulfilling customer preference for flexibility in using cloud providers while also enabling them to avoid dreaded lock-in scenarios,\u201d Westfall noted. \u201cFrom my view this multi-cloud strategy links to Oracle\u2019s Q1 revenue figures for Q1 FY23 demonstrating great promise, especially on the cloud revenue side where cloud revenue services increased to $3.6 billion, a 44% rise from $2.5 billion in the same quarter a year ago. As such, from my view, Oracle\u2019s cloud database portfolio development strategy is moving the needle at improving overall financial performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oracle got its start in the late 1970s when a computer programmer at Ampex Corporation<\/a> named Larry Ellison and a couple of his colleagues saw commercial potential in an academic paper about the relational database. Oracle\u2019s founders correctly predicted that an ability to organize large amounts of data, combined with rapid storage and retrieval, would find a market in the corporate world.<\/p>\n

Four and a half decades later, Ellison as chairman and chief technology officer has reshaped his business model to encompass a new world of data that is structured, unstructured and heavily dependent on analytics, machine learning and transaction processing. The history of Silicon Valley is replete with companies that tried a second act and failed as the technology changed around them. With Exadata X9M and MySQL HeatWave, Oracle appears determined to maintain its impact on the database world for a long time to come.<\/p>\n

Photo: Luigi Saporetti-Flickr<\/h5>\n
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