Oracle Launches Technology Offensive

CEO claims architecture superior to others'

June 25, 2001 (Computerworld)

Now that it considers the recent flap about its high prices to be old news, Oracle Corp. has initiated a new attack in the war of databases, this time on the technology front.

Since the launch this month of his company's latest database product, Oracle9i [News, June 18], CEO Larry Ellison has taken to the streets with this simple and clear message: Oracle9i's new clustering technology and its shared disk architecture allow users' systems to "run faster, less expensively and more reliably" than those with technology from IBM and Microsoft Corp.

Those companies are wedded to a database setup called the shared nothing architecture, which is outmoded, Ellison claimed.

However, experts, users and those other vendors said the technical realities behind Ellison's marketing campaign are more complex than his message suggests. The bottom line, said experts, is that while Oracle9i is an important step forward in database technology, IBM's and Microsoft's way of doing things isn't as futile as Ellison makes them out to be.

The debate over which is the better approach dates back to the 1980s, when the first commercial parallel database architectures came into being. In shared disk clusters—groups of independent servers that cooperate as a single system—all servers have equal access to all of the data stored on multiple disks. In shared nothing clusters, data is partitioned across multiple disks, and each server has access to a subset of those disks.

Ellison's main argument is that Oracle9i is the first clustered database that can run so-called packaged applications, such as those from PeopleSoft Inc. and SAP AG, in an environment that he said offers limitless scalability and "basically just keeps running." IBM's DB2 and Microsoft's SQL Server can't do this, he said. He also argues that shared nothing is prone to single points of failure and requires bigger, more expensive hardware to scale.

However, the controversial chief salesman of Redwood Shores, Calif., has yet to prove anything, said his two chief rivals. "The proof is in the pudding, and we haven't seen any pudding yet," said Jeff Ressler, Microsoft's lead SQL Server product manager. Ressler said Oracle hasn't produced any industry-standard benchmark results to back up its claims and has yet to produce winning benchmarks on clusters.

Jeff Jones, a senior program manager at IBM's data management group, said he's prepared to challenge every one of Ellison's claims and, citing a lack of benchmarks, added that those claims remain unproven.

However, Ressler acknowledged a key point in Ellison's argument. "It's true that most packaged applications are not supported by shared nothing," said Ressler. "Shared nothing is not an availability approach. But most packaged applications do not need the scalability" of clusters, which Oracle fails to acknowledge, he said.

Richard Winter, president of Waltham, Mass.-based Winter Corp. and a top independent expert in database technologies, said Ellison's argument has strengths and weaknesses. For example, Ellison's claims that shared disk offers more flexible workload management and higher efficiency are on the mark. But Ellison's contention that a node failure on a shared nothing architecture means you lose part of your data isn't always true, said Winter. This is the case in only "the purest" of shared nothing architectures, he said.

"Shared nothing is ordinarily run with dual ported disks or with the data in a storage-area network in which all disks are physically accessible from all nodes," he said. Still, if two or more nodes fail, then Ellison's claims stand, he said.

The Great Database Debate Each major vendor uses a different architecture. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has launched an offensive claiming his product is technically superior. IBM Oracle Microsoft Shared nothing architecture: Although the complete database is seen with a single system image, each portion of the clustered database lives on its own machine. Each machine has access to its own set of data. Ellison acknowledges that this architecture on the OS/390 "does a pretty good job." Shared disk architecture: This approach is based on the assumption that every processing node has equal access to all data. All data remains available even when only one cluster node is working. Cluster architecture: In a cluster, SQL Server runs on one machine and, in the event of a failure, can be failed over to another machine. Windows 2000 Advanced Server supports two-node clusters, while Windows 2000 Datacenter supports four nodes (as shown).