Summary

Now that you’ve read this introductory chapter, it should be clear to you that the Oracle Exadata Database Machine builds upon Oracle database capabilities familiar to an immense worldwide technical community, but also adds new innovative integrated software and hardware that could have a profound impact on your organization. Having the benefit of looking back, we can see how this platform evolved from development efforts at Oracle that took place over a period of years. The acquisition of Sun now enables Oracle to entirely develop, build, sell, and support pre-engineered and integrated software and hardware solutions.

Given how the evolution took place, we structured the book to next review some Oracle database topics that might be familiar to you. Those topics will lay the groundwork for gaining a full understanding of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine platform as we cover it in detail in later chapters.