Relief for Oracle Users Struggling with Performance and Large Data Sets
October 13, 2009
The news from Oracle World, now underway, has been ho hum. I learned yesterday that Perfect Search, a company who has had me do briefings about the problems big data poses to relational database systems, alerted me to one of its new engagements. Perfect Search is one of the companies developing systems that can cope with petascale datasets. The Perfect Search approach pivots on proprietary technology that chops down the hardware footprint needed to deal with billions of rows and columns. I have interviewed company executives and my team has put the Perfect Search system through a series of tests using my Google patent collection. You can see the system in action on my test corpus on ArnoldIT.com. Like Aster Data and InfoBright, Perfect Search took a clean sheet of paper and figured out how to scale without compromising the client’s budget. The Perfect Search technology can run on premises, in an appliance, or as a hosted service.
OneGreatFamily.com has contracted to install the Perfect Search Database Search Appliance for Oracle to search the more than 200 million names submitted to OneGreatFamily.com that are stored within their Oracle database. At www.OneGreatFamily.com, users enter names, dates, and facts about their family tree. The site compares this information against its details for more than 200 million names already published in other family trees – and it continues searching as hundreds of thousands of new names are added each week. When exact matches of information are found, the trees are automatically merged.
Oracle and IBM have been working overtime to find ways to give clients ways to index, query, and serve results for petascale datasets. The solutions are new and expensive. The problem that any Codd database system faces is that today’s data flows don’t fit into the Codd approach. Not surprisingly, the solutions are expensive and tough to configure, maintain, and optimize.
Perfect Search and a handful of other data management firms have found ways to deal with large data flows without the server footprint and attendant power and cooling problems, performance woes, and ever rising costs.
Ken Ebert, CTO of Perfect Search, states,”Companies that have massive amounts of data struggle to index and search these large content repositories in a timely, cost-effective manner. We are able to search over a billion records on a single Database Search Appliance. We are excited to be able to be involved in the important work of genealogy and be associated with such a visionary company as OneGreatFamily.com.”
You can get more information about Perfect Search at the company’s Web site and by reading the interview I conducted with Mr. Ebert in November 2008. If you are struggling with RDBMS scaling and performance issues, you will want to do a deep dive into the Perfect Search approach. Data swimming is enjoyable with the Perfect Search system. Similar exertions with Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server can give me a headache.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2009
(I briefed Perfect Search executives twice on the woes of the Codd system for fruit juice and sushi. No Kentucky Fried Chicken, however.)
Comments
11 Responses to “Relief for Oracle Users Struggling with Performance and Large Data Sets”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
what hardware is used on oneGreatFamily site ?
what query rate ?
response time
In response to what the hardware is for OneGreatFamily – they are running on a Windows based commodity appliance. We also just released a Linux based appliance.
On the questions on query rates, and response time – we are just doing the implementation now, so we don’t have those numbers specifically for OneGreatFamily. We have implemented similar solutions and have always achieved sub-second response. The Perfect Search Appliance is rated for up to 50 queries per second per appliance.
[…] I’m a fan of Stephen Arnold’s Beyond Search blog. For anybody wanting to stay up to date on what’s happening in search I’d highly recommend it. Mr. Arnold is a world renowned expert in search and updates his blog daily. Coincidentally he’s also a fan of Perfect Search. […]
I am new in the world of Oracle. I need experts help.
I want to learn about Oracle.
Family Trees are very interesting to know specially if you have a large extended family ~
we always keep track of our family tree because it is exciting to know the family tree ;*.
Thank you for this amazing info. It was very helpful to me and to the one who read this page. You truly is a genius writer!
Useful information shared..I am very happy i have read this article..thanks for giving us nice info.
At the moment I stumbled upon the web for exactly this kind of details. Be grateful for to your write-up that search needs to ending right now. You published the article in a really clear way. With this, I included your blog sites as one of my personal favorites! All the best!