Exadata Software

Abstract

Exadata’s fast, balanced hardware configuration provides an Oracle infrastructure capable of delivering high performance for Oracle databases, but the hardware is only part of the equation. To truly deliver extreme performance, Oracle has designed and deployed several key software solutions inside Exadata, each of whose primary goal is to either reduce the demand for I/O resources or boost the speed of I/O operations. Oracle’s performance goal with Exadata was to eliminate I/O as the bottleneck for database operations. Oracle has been successful in meeting this goal by not only leveraging performance capabilities with Oracle 11gR2 database, grid infrastructure, and Oracle ASM, but also by developing InfiniBand-aware I/O communication protocols into the Oracle software stack that fundamentally changes how Oracle performs physical I/O. Each of these Exadata software features works without application code modification and, under the right conditions, each of these can be used to deliver extreme performance.