Start your servers: Intel’s next-gen CPU smokes!

Posted by David Yahalom under Hardware, Oracle

UPDATE: Whoops! Had bad URL in link to Nehalem Benchmarks. Fixed!

AnandTech, one of the best sources of hardware news & reviews,  have just published preliminary benchmarks of Intel’s next-gen CPU - the Nehalem.

Even when the CPU is not using final silicon and being coupled with a very early and unstable motherboard, it smoked the benchmarks suppressing a Penryn-based Core2 quad by as much as %50! In fact, a 2.6Ghz Nehalem is faster than a 3.2Ghz Penryn! Amazing.

This got me thinking about the x86 server market, especially when compared to non-x86 servers such as SPARC or PowerPC machines.
Even now we see that dollar-to-dollar, x86 servers can sometime outperform non-x86 hardware.

Nowadays when Oracle RAC clusters based on cheap $7000 x86 servers outperform single-instance super expensive high-end Sun/IBM servers, Intel’s new Nehalem could very well be the final proof many DBAs need in order to ditch their old SPARC/PowerPC servers and transition to Linux x86 RAC installations.

Anyway, AMD is going to launch a new chip design in early 2009 and I still see great promise in IBMs Cell CPU deign.

Interesting times ahead.

Read more about Nehalem’s architecture and on-die memory controller here.

Oracle Virtual Directory

Posted by David Yahalom under ETL, General IT, Oracle

Another presentation I’ve made not too long ago at an Israel Oracle User Group meeting (sponsored in part by Xpert-One1, the consulting and solution provider company I work for) was about a relatively little known product (at least by Oracle terms) called Oracle Virtual Directory.

OVD allows for Enterprise Level LDAP without synchronization.

Oracle Virtual Directory provides LDAP and XML views of existing enterprise identity information without synchronizing or moving data from its native locations.

OVD can connect to pretty much anything JAVA can connect to and expose several different LDAP directories and RDMBS data repositories as a single LDAP tree.

Think about it. You can virtually “unify” all the different directories in your organizations (be it RDBMS servers or LDAP directories) as a single directory service - which is so much easier to work with. And without any sort of synchronization.

Very very cool.

You can get my presentation here.

OVD is availiable for download, free, from OTN. 

The secure Oracle database - howto

Posted by David Yahalom under Security, Oracle

Last week I’ve held a 45 minute presentation about Oracle-made DB security solutions at a customer convention held by Xpert-One1, the company I work for (Xpert-one1).

It was a pretty neat presentation focusing on how to achieve 360 degrees of protection for your database, how most security exploits originate from within the organization (an IDC study shows as much as %80) and how while network security is well understood (firewalls, VPNs, etc) database security is almost always forsaken (not many businesses expect their DBAs to be security focused).

My presentation covers the following Oracle products and how the fit in creating a secure database:

Oracle Database Vault
Oracle Advanced Security
Oracle Transparent Table Encryption
Oracle Label Security & Oracle Virtual Private Database
Oracle Secure Backup
Oracle Grid Control

You can download my presentation here.

It’s high level, since the audience we were targeting were CTOs, IT managers, security guys and not actual DBAs.

Fell free to leave comments or contact me if you have questions or want more information.