Overview of Oracle Exadata Database Machine

The 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 delivers outstanding 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 performance with 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 database server 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/O operations. 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 secure database machine. Building on the superior security capabilities of the Oracle Database, the Exadata storage provides the ability to query fully encrypted databases with near zero overhead at hundreds of gigabytes per second. The combination of these, and many other, features of the product are the basis of the outstanding performance of the Exadata Database Machine.

The Exadata Database Machine has also been designed to work with, or independently of, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. The Exalogic Elastic Cloud provides the best platform to run Oracle’s Fusion Middleware and Oracle’s Fusion applications. The combination of Exadata and Exalogic is a complete hardware and software engineered solution that delivers high-performance for all enterprise applications including Oracle EBusiness Suite, Siebel, and PeopleSoft applications.