Well, I was starting to worry that I was completely out of step with the blogosphere, because finally a keynote presentation worth writing about and no-one seems keen, but I’ve only just noticed this quote in Pete Scott’s blog posting.
"For strange people like me, people that see the world as moving large
amounts of data around, it was exciting news. For me, data retrieval
and storage are bulk processes and need to be achieved in way that does
not swamp the capacity of that weak link, IO bandwidth."
Exactly!
I was personally pretty excited about yesterday’s keynote and announcements and then, when I got back to the OTN lounge everyone was shrugging their shoulders in disappointment and bewilderment. What was so exciting about that? Eh?!??! What would have been more exciting - 11gR2? Fusion? Beehive???
Stuff like the HP Oracle Exabyte storage appliance are exactly why I’m in this business. I love systems and new architectures and high performance. Call me crazy, but who *cares* how many customers will benefit from it. I’m not a stockbroker, or a (cough) industry analyst, I’m a techie. As a techie, I think the new hardware/software combination is awesome, frankly and there’s lots to discuss about it. So, if I was bit terse with some people yesterday, just put it down to my natural disappointment that the majority of people weren’t as excited as I was. Maybe it was because everyone guessed so wrong, that they were covering their embarassment 
(and, really, as I posted on Christo’s theory blog, a very close version of this already existed here, in Luke Lonergan’s comment.)
I suppose you could make the argument that few of us are going to get to work with this, but few of us can afford a Ferrari, that doesn’t make a lot of us lust after them any less, does it and, as with all IT innovations, it’s going to filter down the chain. There are lots of people who want big Data Warehouses these days. It’s about time someone implemented a balanced system that does the job, rather than hanging big storage arrays off a couple of bits of string!
Anyway, here are a couple of posts from Kevin Closson who knows more about it than most (with links to White Papers)
http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/oracle-exadata-storage-server-software-part-i/http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2008/09/25/oracle-exadata-storage-server-part-ii/
To maintain my excitement, I went to Juan Loaiza’s session this morning which went into more technical detail. It’s really not just about hardware, but I’m not going to get into technical details here - the white papers and Kevin’s blog will cover that. Then I went over to the Moscone North demo-grounds where Kevin and others are showing the thing in action. (Terrible picture warning!)
I watched a great short presentation from Greg Rahn which included one demo scanning 2 billion rows with no tricks or compression or special features in 21 seconds.
Nice. Do you think they’ll let me borrow one for my house if I promise to blog about it?!
Really, if you want to see something X-tremely cool and maybe review your original thoughts on the announcement, why not pop into Moscone North, take a look and ask some tough questions?
(Please note - this is the Grumpy Old Man version of yesterday and I’m only grumpy through over-excitement. The cheerful version will be along some time soon.)