IBM unveils Power8 and OpenPower pincer attack on Intel’s x86 server monopoly

 

IBM has taken the wraps off the first servers that are powered by its monstrously powerful Power8 CPUs. With more than 4 billion transistors, packed into a stupidly large 650-square-millimeter die built on IBM’s new 22nm SOI process, the 12-core (96-thread) Power8 CPU is one of the largest and probably the most powerful CPU ever built. In a separate move, IBM is opening up the entire Power8 architecture and technical documentation through the OpenPower Foundation, allowing third parties to make Power-based chips (much like ARM’s licensing model), and to allow for the creation of specialized coprocessors (GPUs, FPGAs, etc.) that link directly into the CPU’s memory space using IBM’s new CAPI interface. You will not be surprised to hear that Nvidia, Samsung, and Google — three huge players among hundreds more who are beholden to Intel’s server monopoly — are core members of the OpenPower Foundation. The Power8 CPU and the OpenPower Foundation are the cornerstones of a very big, well-orchestrated plan to finally put an end to x86′s reign, and place a fairer, more powerful architecture at the head of the server table.

First, we should talk about the new Power8 chip. There are 12 CPU cores, each with 512KB of L2 SRAM and 8MB of L3 EDRAM, for a total of 6MB L2 and 96MB L3 cache respectively. There is then a further 230GB/sec of bandwidth to 1TB of DRAM. Whereas each Intel Xeon core is capable of two-way simultaneous threading, and Power7+ cores can do four threads, Power8 ups the ante to eight simlutaneous threads (SMT). As you’d expect, other parts of the chip have been similarly expanded to cater for the Power8′s massive parallelism: There are eight decoders (up from 6), six dispatches per clock cycle, a doubling of load units (4), the data cache can now process four 128-bit transactions per cycle, and the bus width between the L2 and data cache is now 512 bits. Take a look at the block diagram below and be awed by its massive parallelism and throughput.

IBM Power8 microarchitecture block diagram [Image credit: The Linley Group]

We expect the Power8 will eventually be capable of clock speeds around 4.5GHz, with a TDP in the region of 250 watts. At this speed, the Power8 CPU will be around 60% faster than the Power7+ in single-threaded applications, and more than two times faster in multithreaded tasks. In certain cases, IBM says the Power8 is capable of analyzing Big Data workloads between 50 and 1,000 times faster than comparable x86 systems (the same amount of RAM, the same number of cores).

Compared to its competitors (Power 7+, the Oracle Sparc T5, the Intel Xeon), the Power8 is anywhere between two and three times more processing power per socket. This is mostly due to the massive thread count (96 vs. 30 for the latest 15-core E7-8890 v2 Xeon), and utterly insane memory bandwidth (230GB/sec vs. 85GB/sec). In terms of performance per watt, though, the Xeon (~150W TDP) is probably just ahead of the Power8 — but in general, when you’re talking servers, power consumption generally plays second fiddle to performance density (how many gigaflops you can squeeze out of a single server).

IBM Power8 CPU die, labeled

Beyond raw SPECint and SPECfp performance, Power8 also introduces CAPI (Coherence Attach Processor Interface). CAPI is a direct link into the CPU, allowing peripherals and coprocessors to communicate directly with the CPU, bypassing (substantial) operating system and driver overheads. CAPI is similar to Intel’s QPI, but where QPI is closed and proprietary, IBM is opening up CAPI to third parties. IBM’s Power Systems CTO, Satya Sharma, told me in an interview that in the case of flash memory attached via CAPI the overhead is reduced by a factor of 20. More importantly, though, CAPI can be used to attach coprocessors — GPUs, FPGAs — directly to the Power8 CPU for some truly insane workload-specific performance boosts. It is due to these CAPI-attached coprocessors that a Power8 system can be 1,000 times faster than a comparable x86 system.

 

The OpenPower Foundation

While the Power8 chip is veritably beastly, it will take a lot more than a fancy piece of hardware to dislodge Intel x86 as the undisputed king of servers (Intel chips currently power somewhere in the region of 95% of all servers.) What IBM needs is a full top-to-bottom Power architecture stack, from first-party and third-party hardware, through to a broad, healthy ISV (independent software vendor) ecosystem. This is where the OpenPower Foundation comes in.

Basically, IBM is making the Power8 architecture and detailed technical documentation open to members of the Foundation. Currently, the foundation consists of Altera, Google, Nvidia, Micron, Samsung, Tyan, ZTE, and others. Each of these members will use the Power documentation in different ways. Altera is developing FPGAs that connect directly into the Power8 chip via CAPI, to provide stupendous speed-ups for specific tasks. Tyan, with help from Google, will create third-party motherboards that are compatible with the Power8 chip, with the goal of producing cheap, Power8-based machines for internet-scale server farms. Nvidia, like Altera, will develop a Tesla-like GPU coprocessor that connects directly to the CPU via CAPI. Suzhou will license the Power architecture to make its own Power8-compatible chips for China’s domestic server market.

Taking down Intel

IBM’s giant Power8 chip, being held in a normal-sized hand.

The hope is that, by cultivating a broad hardware and software ecosystem, Power will be able to challenge Intel in the server space. IBM wants to be the ARM of servers, basically: In much the same way that ARM’s open architecture and licensing model allowed it to squash Intel in the mobile and embedded spaces, IBM wants to do the same thing in servers.

Usually I would say that it’s a fool’s errand to challenge Intel, but if anyone can do it, it’s IBM. There is a lot of antipathy towards Intel and the strategies it has used to dismantle everyone and everything that has threatened to disrupt its dominion over the computing industry. Server vendors (IBM, HP, Dell) and internet-scale service providers (Google, Facebook) use x86 chips, but only because Intel has ensured that there’s no other viable option. I don’t think there’s a single company that doesn’t want to get out from underneath the choking heft of Intel x86 — and now, at long last, IBM might be offering a way out. If the surge in mobile computing has taught us anything it’s that Intel isn’t unbeatable — that there’s a chink in its armor that IBM and the rest of the OpenPower Foundation think it can exploit. “We are entering some new spaces,” Sharma told me. “It’s a transformational event for Power. It’s going to take Power to new spaces we haven’t gone before.”

New Power8 servers, being tended to by a couple of IBMers

IBM also announced today that Canonical’s Ubuntu Server will be available for all Power8-based systems, and that it will continue to invest in Linux (IBM/Power is historically Unix-focused, not Linux). “Now is the time to expand into the Linux space,” Sharma said as our interview was wrapping up. “Ubuntu is now one of the primary targets for Power.”

The first Power8 servers will be available from June 10, with a range of 1- and 2-socket 2U and 4U models. The Power S812L and Power S822L (both 2U) will exclusively run Linux. The flagship of the Power8 line is the Power S824, a 4U design with two CPU sockets, maxing out at 24 cores (192 threads) and 1TB of RAM. The low-end Linux-powered S812L server starts at $8000. (IBM wouldn’t tell us the exact pricing of a standalone Power8 CPU, but it’s probably in the region of $5,000.)

PayPal completes a 60-day migration to Oracle Exadata

 

SAN FRANCISCO -- It was shortly after PayPal had tested the Oracle Exadata X2-8 box that corporate executives sent a mandate to IT: Ramp up your compute and storage capacity tenfold, and do it fast.

Normally, this sort of project takes several years. But PayPal was growing fast and needed to quickly meet its service level agreements (SLAs). In particular, it was looking to cut down transaction response times to about 40 mm as opposed to the 160 to 400 mm they were getting with their Solaris SPARC infrastructure. And PayPal wanted to get the project done in months, not years.

Amit Das, engineering architect at PayPal, said the company was growing exponentially and, at its peak, handling 500 payments per second. Das described a fast-paced online transaction processing (OLTP) environment with more than 500 Oracle Database instances, up to 14,000 concurrent processes, and 80,000 executions per second. The company's popular Web front end needed a lot of compute muscle on the back end.

 

Can you really compare Exadata with SAP HANA?

Das had become familiar with Exadata well before the project began. Prior to joining PayPal last year, he worked with Oracle and was technical lead for the world's first production "go-live" for Exadata, at Apple Inc. He also has more than a decade of experience working with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).

Earlier this year, Das and members of the IT team at PayPal began exploring the idea of using Oracle Exadata for the necessary ramp-up. It ended up taking about 60 days from pilot testing to production, he said.

PayPal installed Exadata "clusters" in two data centers. The new setup includes production clusters, standby clusters, and a test and development cluster. Each production cluster includes a four-node RAC configuration with 64 Exadata storage cells and two Exadata X2-8s. The total amount of space on each cluster: 131 TB.

The company deployed its production clusters in about five days. It synced up its existing information stores to Exadata using Oracle GoldenGate and performed data validation. They then completed an end-to-end application switchover, which only required 10 minutes of downtime.

"Most of that time was due to restarting the application tier," Das said. "PayPal is very happy with Exadata. It is meeting all our SLAs."

PayPal is not done. Das said that the company is interested in the Exadata X3-2 models, which Oracle officially announced on Sept. 30. The new Exadata machines boast faster processing and better capacity than the X2-8.

PayPal is also taking a look at Oracle Database 12c, which Oracle unveiled this week at its annual OpenWorld conference. Das said he is particularly interested in Oracle Database 12c's Pluggable Databases feature as well as improvements to RAC.

Google Lawyer Touts Oracle Trial Victory

 Google Inc.'s general counsel lauded the courtroom victory won by the Internet giant Wednesday against Oracle Corp. as a warning for firms considering filing patent litigation in the future.

A federal jury had decided earlier in the day that Google didn't infringe two of Oracle's patents that protect its Java technology, as Oracle had alleged.

The win for Google came as its high-profile San Francisco trial with Oracle over both patent and copyright claims related to Google's Android mobile phone software drags into its second month, and appears to be drawing to a close.

"I think you've seen a lot of patent cases filed lately, and most of them have not resulted in successful outcomes for plaintiffs," said Google General Counsel Kent Walker. "That may send a message to those who might want to do these things in the future."

Mr. Walker declined to say how much Google has spent to defend itself against Oracle's infringement allegations, but said such lawsuits can cost about $5 million per patent to defend.

Oracle originally asserted seven patents against Google, though that number had been whittled down to two by the time the trial began last month.

It wasn't immediately clear if Oracle will appeal the patent verdict.

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment.

The patent verdict capped a second phase of the ongoing trial. A first phase had been focused on Oracle's copyright infringement claims.

That first phase ended with a mixed verdict, as the jury found Google infringed on copyrights protecting Java interfaces, but couldn't decide if that was acceptable under the fair use doctrine—which allows for some limited use of copyrighted material.

The trial is expected to resume next week, though the jury has been dismissed.

Mr. Walker said he expects the judge overseeing the case to issue a ruling on the copyrightability of the Java interfaces some time in the next couple of weeks.

If the judge rules that some or all of the interfaces can be protected with copyrights, Oracle is expected to pursue damages that could be significant.

Mr. Walker said a ruling that the interfaces are protected "would be a real threat to software development," which often relies on making legal use of others' code.

Google's general counsel said excessive patent litigation partly results from flaws in the U.S. patent system, which can issue legal protections to broad or obvious ideas.

"The goal is to make sure we have high quality patents," Mr. Walker said, "so that a patent doesn't become a lottery ticket" in court.

Google's partners have faced a number of additional infringement suits related to Android, which is developed according to an open source model that makes use of outside engineering.

Earlier this week, Google closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings, which has a broad portfolio of thousands of patents.

The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium

 

The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium

Comment When I saw the news on Wednesday morning, I thought I had picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue. Or maybe Oracle did. Either way, Oracle’s announcement that it is halting development on HP-UX/Itanium versions of its products touched off a firestorm of phone calls, emails and tweets that just won’t let up.

TPM covered the basics in his excellent story here. Snarky ‘Itanic’ jibes in the headlines aside, HP-UX based Unix systems are in use in a large number of customer data centers, as are IBM Power Unix systems and Oracle SPARC boxes.

These big iron boxes have moved from being the hot new thing a decade ago into more of a mission-critical, mainframe-esque role in mid-sized and large data centers.   What first struck me about the Oracle press release is the claim that “Intel management made it clear that their strategic focus is on their x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing end of life”.

Funny, that directly contradicts what I’ve heard for years directly from Intel and HP. Intel has been more forthcoming about Itanium roadmaps, dates and specifications than at any time in recent memory. Oracle, by contrast, has reinforced its reputation as the North Korea of the server business … only without the charisma and cool Texaco flag.

Why would Intel publicly discuss Itanium roadmaps if it was near end-of-life? Why would it tell Oracle one thing about its plans and HP, industry analysts and the press another? Why would Intel do something that would make them look either deceptive or stupid? Answer: it wouldn’t. Intel doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.

Gold in them thar processors

Intel is making good money on Itanium processors – more than enough to justify future development. HP is making good money on Integrity (HP-UX + Itanium) systems. Hell, even Oracle is making money on software installed on HP-UX systems. In fact, it is making even more since it tweaked licensing terms to jack up database pricing on HP Unix systems. So if everyone is making bank (including Oracle), why disrupt things now?

This is what Ellison meant when he said that Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s

I think that Oracle simply wants to cut a competitor out of the Unix running and make a play for their installed base. I’ve been in the enterprise server business for more than 15 years now (God, I’m old). For the last five years, I’ve run comprehensive Unix vendor surveys among data center respondents.

They compare the major Unix vendors (HP, IBM and Sun/Oracle) on a wide variety of technical and customer support criteria. In general, IBM and HP tend to beat Sun/Oracle on the majority of questions, which include OS qualities, RAS, performance, and vendor support. (We’ll publish the results from our most recent survey in coming weeks.)

Our survey respondents also indicate that Oracle’s installed base isn’t very comfortable with Oracle’s plans, the way the company communicates those plans, or the support they receive This is quite a change from the Sun days, when most respondents may not have been all that wild about the systems, but they seemed to always like the company and the support it provided.

Let’s say I’m right, and Oracle is playing every card they can to build up its hardware business and drive customers away from HP. Why stop there? How long until it announces it is halting development on IBM AIX versions of its software? Or change the licensing terms to make it even more expensive to deploy on Power vs. any Oracle alternative? Taking it a bit further, is there an Oracle plan to find a way to charge customers a bit more if they run Oracle software on Dell, HP, or IBM x86 hardware? Maybe crank up the support costs a bit higher?

Lock-in

To me, this is the reality of what Ellison meant when he said that Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s. Oracle wants to have the incredible margins that IBM enjoyed back then. It wants to have that lock-in that IBM had in the days when there were few alternatives and even fewer standards that would allow customers to easily move from vendor to vendor.

But we don’t live in the 1960s, or even in the 1990s. Back in the 90s and early 00s, Oracle had the power to push server vendors out of the business simply by announcing that it was moving its DB port to a vendor’s OS to second-tier status. If Oracle dropped support of an OS entirely, it was the kiss of death – something that was widely speculated about in vendor and customer communities.

But it’s a different world today. There are a lot of alternatives for HP-UX customers to consider. The current version of IBM’s DB2 database, for example, is fully supported on HP-UX.   There is also a difference in vendor scale today. It used to be easy for Oracle to bully small vendors like Sequent, Pyramid, Data General, NCR and even DEC. They could even intimidate the Unix brands of larger companies such as HP and IBM.

But  today’s systems vendors are larger, more diversified and have more options. Customers today are different too, more sophisticated and not as frightened when it comes to changing systems, databases, or applications. Perhaps most importantly, customers have greater control than ever over their IT choices.

Will Oracle’s gambit work? Will it result in greater system sales? Higher database sales on their own iron? Or will there be a backlash from customers who now see the Ghost of Christmas Future – Oracle tightening the screws and reducing their options until they buckle under and start buying Oracle iron to run Oracle software?

It’s too early to tell. But based on what I’m hearing from clients and what I’ve seen in my own research, I’m betting on backlash. ®

The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium

Two billion-transistor beasts: POWER7 and Niagara 3

     By Jon Stokes |

A 300mm Power 7 processor wafer

In years past, an ISSCC presentation on a new processor would consist of detailed discussion of the chip's microarchitecture (pipeline, instruction fetch and decode, execution units, etc.), along with at least one shot of a floorplan that marked out the location of major functional blocks (the decoder, the floating-point unit, the load-store unit, etc.). This year's ISSCC is well into the many-core era, though, and with single-chip core counts ranging from six to 16, the only elements you're likely to see in a floorplan like the two below are cores, interfaces, and switches. Most of the discussion focuses on power-related arcana, but most folks are interested in the chips themselves.

In this short article, I'll walk you through the floorplan of two chips with similar transistor counts—the Sun's Niagara 3 and IBM's POWER7. Most CPU geeks will already know a lot of the information I'll give below, but many readers will appreciate having it all together in one place.

Niagara 3: threads and I/O

Sun's Niagara 3

Sun's 1 billion-transistor, 16-core Niagara 3 processor is a great example of modern multiprocessor-turned-SoC (system on a chip). Everything about this design is focused on pushing large numbers of parallel instruction streams and data streams through the processor socket at once. The shared cache is small, the shared pipes are wide, and the end result is a chip that's all about maintaining a high rate of flow, and not one that's aimed at collecting a large pile of data and chipping away at it with heavy equipment.

Each of the 16 individual SPARC cores that make up Niagara 3 support up to eight simultaneous threads of execution, for a total of 128 threads per chip. Logically, the chip is laid out so that all of the cores communicate with a unified 6MB L2 cache via a crossbar switch that's placed in the middle of the chip. This combination of cores and L2 connected via a switch forms the basic compute architecture of the SoC.

So that the chip can talk to the outside world, the L2 caches are connected to a variety of I/O interfaces: memory, PCIe, 1G/10G Ethernet, and coherency links. All told, those links can push a total of 2.4Tb/s worth of data through a single Niagara 3 socket—that's a lot of bandwidth, but you need it to feed that many threads. Let's take a quick look at each of these I/O links in turn.

Coherence: Niagra 3's coherence links are the equivalent of the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) on Intel's Nehalem parts, or of HyperTransport for AMD. These links can be used to connect up to four of the chips together without any additional routing chips (this is what's meant by saying Niagara 3 can be used in a four-socket glueless configuration). Each Niagara 3 chip has two 1.6GHz coherence controllers, which are connected to six coherence links. Each individual link consists of 14 unidirectional lanes that give the link a total bandwidth of 9.6Gb/s.

Memory: Also attached to the L2 is are two DDR3 memory controllers, each of which hosts two memory channels, for a total of four channels of DDR3.

PCIe and Ethernet: A PCIe controller supports two 5Gb/s PCIe ports, and an Ethernet controller supports two 1G/10G Ethernet ports.

IBM's POWER7

IBM's POWER7

At 1.2 billion transistors, IBM's new 45nm POWER7 processor is only a little bigger than Niagara 3, but it couldn't be more different. If Niagara 3 is an army of guys with shovels, POWER7 is a giant bulldozer.

POWER7 has only half the cores (eight) and one quarter of the threads (32) of Sun's chip, but that doesn't mean it falls short in the horsepower department. Each POWER7 core has a ton of very fast execution hardware, and the overall layout of the machine's very wide execution core is a straightforward evolution of the design that I first described in a series of articles on the PowerPC 970. (I talked more about POWER7's execution core in an earlier article comparing it to Intel's Tukwila Itanium.)

Where Niagra 3 keeps a large number of relatively weak cores busy by moving data onto and off of the chip using ample I/O resources, POWER7's approach to feeding a smaller number of much more robust cores is to cache large amounts of data on-chip so that the cores can grind through it in batches. This being the case, POWER7 has the most remarkable on-chip cache hardware of any processor on the market.

First in the chain is the 32KB L1 data cache, which has seen its latency cut in half, from four cycles in the POWER6 to two cycles in POWER7. Then there's the 256KB L2, the latency of which has dropped from 26 cycles in POWER6 to eight cycles in POWER7—that's quite a reduction, and will help greatly to mitigate the impact of the shared L3's increased latency.

The POWER7's L3 is its most unique feature, and, at 32MB, it's positively gigantic. IBM was able to cram such a large L3 onto the chip by making it out of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) instead of the usual SRAM. This decision cost the cache a few cycles of latency, but in exchange IBM got a 3.5x improvement in power efficiency and a 3x improvement in cache density. IBM has actually been talking up the use of eDRAM for on-chip cache since at least 2002, so in this regard POWER7 represents the fruition of years of work on this approach.

On the I/O side, POWER7 features two DDR3 memory controllers that can do up to 100GB/s total. The chip's SMP links (the same as Niagara's coherence links) can do 360GB/s (or almost 2.9Tb/s) of bandwidth, but this amount appears to be divided between internal and external SMP links. The chip doesn't contain the other I/O options—PCIe or Ethernet—that Niagara has.

Ultimately, these two server-class processors show that there are two very different ways to spend a billion transistors, and each design will be good for different applications. Sun's Niagara is aimed at networked server operations where lots of simultaneous, lightweight requests have to be serviced—databases, Web servers, and the like. In contrast, POWER7 has the horsepower to grind through a smaller number of more compute-intensive tasks at a high rate of speed. Both parts have their place in the server ecosystem of 2010.

 

 

Oracle RDBMS History Over the Years

 

Here’s a timeline of how things progressed:

■ 1970 Dr. Edgar Codd publishes his theory of relational data modeling.

■ 1977 Software Development Laboratories (SDL) formed by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, Ed
Oates, and Bruce Scott with $2,000 of startup cash. Larry and Bob come from Ampex
xxxii Oracle Database 10g Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques
where they were working on a CIA project code-named “Oracle.” Bob and Bruce begin
work on the database.

 

■ 1978 The CIA is the first customer, but the product is not released commercially. SDL
changes its name to Relational Software Inc. (RSI).
■ 1979 RSI ships the first commercial version, Version 2 (there is no V1 shipped because
of fears that people wouldn’t buy a first version of the software) of the database written
in Assembler Language. The first commercial version of the software is sold to
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It is the first commercial RDBMS on the market.
■ 1981 The first tool, Interactive Application Facility (IAF), which is a predecessor to
Oracle’s future SQL*Forms tool, is created.
■ 1982 RSI changes its name to Oracle Systems Corporation (OSC) and then simplifies
the name to Oracle Corporation.
■ 1983 Version 3, written in C (which makes it portable), is shipped. Bob Miner writes
half, while also supporting the Assembler based V2, and Bruce Scott writes the other
half. It is the first 32-bit RDBMS.
■ 1984 Version 4 is released. First tools are released (IAG –genform, IAG-runform, RPT).
First database with read consistency. Oracle ported to the PC.
■ 1985 Versions 5 & 5.1 are released; first Parallel Server database on VMS/VAX.
■ 1986 Oracle goes public March 12th (the day before Microsoft and eight days after
Sun). The stock opens at $15 and closes at $20.75. Oracle Client-Server is introduced.
First client-server database. Oracle5.1 is released.
■ 1987 Oracle is the largest DBMS company. Oracle Applications group started. First
SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) database introduced.
■ 1987 Rich Niemiec along with Brad Brown and Joe Trezzo working at Oracle
implement the first production client-server application running Oracle on a souped-up
286 running 16 concurrent client-server users for NEC Corporation.
■ 1988 Oracle V6 released. First row-level locking. First hot database backup. Oracle
moves from Belmont to Redwood Shores. PL/SQL introduced.
■ 1992 Oracle V7 is released.
■ 1993 Oracle GUI client-server development tools introduced. Oracle Applications
moved from character mode to client-server.
■ 1994 Bob Miner, the genius behind the Oracle database technology, dies of cancer.
■ 1995 First 64-bit database.
■ 1996 Oracle7.3 released.
■ 1997 Oracle8 is introduced. Oracle Application Server is introduced. Applications
for the Web are introduced. Oracle is the first Web database. Oracle BI tools, like
Discoverer, are introduced for data warehousing. Tools have native Java support.
■ 1998 First major RDBMS (Oracle8) ported to Linux. Applications 11 shipped. Oracle is
the first database with XML support.
Introduction xxxiii
■ 1999 Oracle8i released. Integrates Java/XML into development tools. Oracle is the first
database with native Java support.
■ 2000 Oracle9i Application Server is released at it becomes the first database with
middle-tier cache. Launches E-Business Suite, wireless database with OracleMobile,
Oracle9i Application Server Wireless, and Internet File System (iFS).
■ 2001 Oracle9i (9.1) released. Oracle is the first database with Real Application
Clusters (RAC).
■ 2002 Oracle9i Release 2 (9.2) released.
■ 2003 Oracle at France Telecom is #1 on Winter Group’s Top Ten in DB size at 29T.
■ 2003 Oracle 10g comes out—grid focused, encrypted backups, auto-tuning, and ASM.
■ 2005 Oracle RAC at Amazon hits the Winter Group’s Top Ten in DB size at 25T.
■ 2005 Oracle buys PeopleSoft (includes JD Edwards), Oblix (Identity Management), Retek
(Retail) for $630M, TimesTen (in memory DB), and Innobase (InnoDB Open Source).
■ 2006 Oracle buys Siebel for $5.8B, Sleepycat Software (Open Source), and Stellant
(Content Management). Oracle with an Open Source push offers “unbreakable” support
for Red Hat Linux.
■ 2006 Oracle 10g Release2 comes out in fall (this book is based on that version).
■ 2007 Oracle buys Hyperion for $3.3B.
■ 2007 Oracle 11g comes out (predicted based on prior releases).
■ 2011 Oracle 12g comes out (predicted based on prior releases).

By Yassine (source :Oracle Database 10g Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques
Richard J. Niemiec)

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