A Brief History of Exadata Time by Juan Loaiza

“we leveraged our 20–30 years of database experience to determine what would be the ideal platform for running the Oracle database. That’s the thinking that produced the Exadata platform as we know it today.” “Exadata V1 used HP hardware. Exadata V2 used Sun hardware. Oracle has always worked very (more...)

Oracle 12c Gives Fresh Life to the Relational Database Movement

Reblogged from So Many Oracle Manuals, So Little Time: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE San Francisco (April 1, 2013) – In a dramatic move calculated to give fresh life to the moribund relational database movement, the latest version of Oracle Corporation’s flagship database has eliminated the famous “join penalty” by making it (more...)

What’s so sacred about relational anyway?

Dedicated to NoSQL and Big Data expert Gwen Shapira for forcing me to think. Bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day—American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay on Self-Reliance. First, a short but fun quiz. 1. Before relational databases, there (more...)

What’s your take on RDBMS and NoSQL?

My take is that application developers have belatedly but correctly concluded that an RDBMS is not the best tool for every application. For example, relational algebra, relational calculus, and SQL are not the best tools for graph problems. As another example, weblogs are non-transactional and don’t benefit from the ACID (more...)

NoSQL and Oracle, Sex and Marriage

In a post entitled “NoSQL and Oracle, Sex and Marriage,” Cary Millsap asks why NoSQL technologies are suddenly so popular. My take is that application developers have belatedly but correctly concluded that an RDBMS is not the best tool for every application. For example, relational algebra, relational calculus, and SQL (more...)

Oracle Corporation Gives Fresh Life to the Relational Database Movement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE San Francisco (April 1, 2013) – In a dramatic move calculated to give fresh life to the moribund relational database movement, database technology leader Oracle Corporation has eliminated the famous “join penalty” by making it possible to store rows from multiple relational tables in the same database (more...)

Be Very Afraid: An interview with the CTO of database security at McAfee

As published in the 105th issue of the NoCOUG Journal (February 2013) Slavik Markovich is vice president and chief technology officer for Database Security at McAfee and has over 20 years of experience in infrastructure, security, and software development. Slavik co-founded Sentrigo, a developer of leading database security technology that was acquired by McAfee in April 2011. Prior [...]

The golden rule of NOT tuning SQL

Dear NoCOUG members and friends, The golden rule of not tuning SQL is “operate with as little information as possible.” Not only will this increase your chances of failure but it will make it difficult for others to help you. Every exercise in problem solving – no matter how little – has exactly six stages: [...]

We don’t use databases; we don’t use indexes

Reblogged from So Many Oracle Manuals, So Little Time: Whenever salespeople phone Mogens Norgaard, he puts them off by saying that he just doesn’t use the products that they are calling about. When the office furniture company phones, he says “We don’t use office furniture.” When the newspaper company phones, he says “We don’t read [...]

We don’t use databases; we don’t use indexes

Whenever salespeople phone Mogens Norgaard, he puts them off by saying that he just doesn’t use the products that they are calling about. When the office furniture company phones, he says “We don’t use office furniture.” When the newspaper company phones, he says “We don’t read newspapers.” When the girl scouts phone, he probably says [...]