Kerry Osborne's Oracle Blog

We started on an interesting mad scientist kind of project a couple of days ago.

One of our long time customers bought an Exadata last month. They went live with one system last week and are in the process of migrating several others. The Exadata has an interesting configuration. The sizing exercise done prior to the purchase indicated a need for 3 compute nodes, but the data volume was relatively small. In the end, a half rack was purchased and all four compute nodes were licensed, but 4 of the 7 storage servers were not licensed. So it’s basically a half rack with only 3 storage servers.

Meanwhile, we had been talking with them about Hadoopie kind of stuff. They are in the telecom space and are interested in pulling data via a packet sniffer which captures info directly from the tcp traffic. During the talks we discussed hardware requirements for building a Hadoop cluster as they didn’t really have any spare hardware available to test with. That’s when the crazy science project idea was born. Someone (who shall remain nameless) suggested that we build the pilot Hadoop cluster on the 4 unused storage nodes from the Exadata half rack. Since the storage servers use basically the same hardware as is used in the Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA), it’s kind of like having a mini BDA. Of course the storage servers have slower CPU’s and a little less memory so it’s not apples to apples, but the servers do have InfiniBand and the same 3T drives so it’s pretty similar. And since they already had the servers sitting there …

So now we have a mini Hadoop cluster installed (CDH3) with 3 data nodes (roughy 100T raw storage). We also set up the Oracle Big Data Connectors on one of the Exadata compute nodes which allows us to create external tables on files stored in HDFS. Pretty cool. Let the games begin!

Oh and by the way. I’ll probably be talking about this project a bit at E4 (Enkitec Extreme Exadata Expo) on Aug. 13-14 in Dallas.

Last year at Oracle Open World I was introduced to a guy named Zhang Leyi (Kamus). He said he had been hired to translate our Expert Exadata book into Chinese. There were a couple of other guys on the team as well – Kaya Huang 黄凯耀 and Jacky Zhang 张瑞. Well they have apparently finished their work and the book is due to be released this month. Kamus sent us a copy of the cover (see below). It looks very sexy don’t you think? We exchanged a few emails with the guys while they were working on it mainly just clarifying our intentions and helping them fix typos in the original version Unfortunately I wasn’t as responsive as I should have been (sorry about that guys), but Tanel and Randy did a pretty good job I think. Not surprisingly, the most difficult part seemed to be translating some of the “Kevin Says” sections, as he has a way of packing a lot into very few words.

So anyway, congratulations to the guys for getting through the project. I hope they send me a copy. 😉