The Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is a

database server A database server is a server which uses a database application that provides database services to other computer programs or to computers, as defined by the client–server model. Database management systems (DBMSs) frequently provide databa ...

appliance made by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

. It was introduced in September 2011 as the mid-market offering in Oracle's family of full-stack,

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systems the company calls

engineered systems Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over their life cycles. At its core, systems engineering utilizes systems thinking p ...

. The ODA is a single

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-mounted device providing a highly-available two-node clustered database server.

History

Oracle introduced its first engineered database system,

Oracle Exadata The Oracle Exadata Database Machine (Exadata) is a computing platform optimized for running Oracle Databases. Exadata is a combined hardware and software platform that includes scale-out Intel x86-64 compute and storage servers, RoCE or Infi ...

, in 2008. In 2011, the company announced the Oracle Database Appliance as a smaller, less powerful alternative to Oracle Exadata at a lower

price point Price points are prices at which demand for a given product is supposed to stay relatively high. Characteristics Introductory microeconomics depicts a demand curve as downward-sloping to the right and either linear or gently convex to the or ...

. According to industry analysts, Oracle expected the Oracle Database Appliance to fill the gap in its product line beneath Oracle Exadata, targeting mid-market customers. The platform proved very popular with

database administrator Database administrators (DBAs) use specialized software to store and organize data. The role may include capacity planning, installation, configuration Configuration or configurations may refer to: Computing * Computer configuration or system c ...

s, with enough support to launch a book about the systems.

Features

The Oracle Database Appliance supports more than database systems. Starting in release 2.5 (ODA V1) and 2.5.5 (ODA V2 X3-2), the Oracle Database Appliance can be deployed using Oracle VM, which allows an administrator to install the application tier along with the database. The Oracle Database Appliance also offers a pay-as-you-grow model for Oracle licenses. This allows a customer to only license the CPU count they need and not the entire capacity of the appliance. When virtualized, this is supported for both the database and the application tier. When the Oracle Database Appliance is connected to a ZS3 storage array, the DBA can leverage Hybrid Columnar Compression for data stored on the array to enable tiered storage and compression ratios exceeding 200%.

Hardware

The first generation of the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA V1) is a two-node cluster in a single rack-mounted chassis. Inside the chassis are two servers, configured in a cluster with shared storage. Each server includes two six-core processors (for a total of 12 cores per server), 96 GB

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, six 1

Gigabit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represent ...

NICs, and two 10 Gigabit NICs. The NICs are configured in an active/passive HA ( bonding) configuration. Inside, the appliance holds four 73 GB SSDs and twenty 600 GB

hard disks A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

for shared storage. Storage is configured during

deployment Deployment may refer to: Engineering and software Concepts * Blue-green deployment, a method of installing changes to a web, app, or database server by swapping alternating production and staging servers * Continuous deployment, a software e ...

for either double or triple

mirroring Mirroring is the behavior in which one person subconsciously imitates the gesture, speech pattern, or attitude of another. Mirroring often occurs in social situations, particularly in the company of close friends or family, often going unnoticed ...

(giving an overall capacity of 6 TB or 4 TB, respectively). The appliance also contains redundant power supplies and cooling fans. Later generations of the appliance moved to a more flexible platform, utilizing Oracle X3-2 and X4-2 x86 servers and one or two SAS storage trays. Each compute node of the latest X4-based configuration includes four 10GBaseT network ports, two 12-core

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same a ...

E5-2697 v2 processors, 256 GB RAM, and optional 10 Gigabit

fiber Fiber or fibre (from la, fibra, links=no) is a natural or artificial substance that is significantly longer than it is wide. Fibers are often used in the manufacture of other materials. The strongest engineering materials often incorpora ...

connectivity. The system can also support up to two storage trays, each with twenty 900 GB hard drives and four 200 GB SSDs for a maximum capacity of 36 TB of hard disk space and another 1.6 TB of SSD space. Single- and double-mirroring of disks is supported, for up to 18 TB of local data storage.

Software

The Oracle Database Appliance runs

Oracle Linux Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006. It is compiled from Red ...

, Oracle Grid Infrastructure for cluster- and storage-management, and a choice of Oracle Enterprise Edition, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), or Oracle RAC One Node. These latter two database products leverage the clustered nature of the hardware to provide database-service

failover Failover is switching to a redundant or standby computer server, system, hardware component or network upon the failure or abnormal termination of the previously active application, server, system, hardware component, or network in a computer n ...

in the event of a failure. Oracle also provides

Oracle Clusterware Oracle Clusterware is the cross-platform cluster software required to run the Real Application Clusters (RAC) option for Oracle Database. It provides the basic clustering services at the operating-system level that enable Oracle Database so ...

for high-availability monitoring and cluster membership, and Oracle

Automatic Storage Management Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is a feature provided by Oracle Corporation within the Oracle Database from release Oracle 10g (revision 1) onwards. ASM aims to simplify the management of database datafiles, control files and log files. To do s ...

(ASM) for storage and disk management. Oracle Appliance Kit (OAK) software offers a built-in management interface.

Administration

Oracle provides a deployment tool called the appliance manager to simplify deployment and make it less time-consuming. The vendor also provides special patch bundles for the database appliance, consisting of patches for firmware, the Linux OS, clustering, storage management, and database which have been tested for compatibility.

Licensing

Customers can choose to license only a subset of the processor cores in the Oracle Database Appliance. This is done by disabling unnecessary processor cores in the BIOS, using a special interface. Cores can be enabled at a later time, allowing customers to increase the capacity of the appliance if required.

Criticism

The Oracle Database Appliance is only available in fixed configurations. Customers cannot cluster multiple appliances together to create a larger cluster (beyond 2 servers), nor can they expand the internal disk storage of the system beyond the two storage trays. However, if a customer runs out of storage space, they can extend their storage to dNFS-attached storage. Currently, when leveraging an Oracle ZS3 array, the storage limit is approximately 3.5 PB.

References

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External links

Official website
Database Appliance Database Appliance