CHAPTER 7
Deploying Data Warehouses on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine

When Oracle first launched the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, it was aimed only at the broad solution area defined as data warehousing. The reason why the initial focus was on data warehousing was simple. Predesigned hardware configurations are well accepted in the data warehousing market and were available from many of Oracle’s competitors. Over the past decade, they have evolved from providing merely balanced server and storage configurations containing fast interconnects to delivering hardware-specific optimizations for typical data warehousing workloads.

Although Oracle’s entry into this arena of providing integrated hardware and software solutions is relatively recent, Oracle is not new to providing data warehousing solutions. In fact, information technology analysts generally agree that Oracle has provided the leading database for data warehousing for many years. Oracle began to introduce key optimization techniques for data warehousing in its database more than 20 years ago. For many organizations, these database optimization techniques provided solutions to their business needs while delivering the solutions on a familiar database engine that was also deployed elsewhere in their organization for transaction-processing applications. However, growing data volumes and workload demands wou....