Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2011/10/04/zfs_piller_get_columner_compression/

Oracle's mighty column stuffs databases

Enough grunt to pack a petabyte into 60TB

By Chris Mellor

Posted in Channel, 4th October 2011 14:02 GMT

OpenWorld Oracle says it can squeeze its databases in ZFS and Pillar Data arrays with Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC).

HCC is applied to OLTP databases and data warehouses, with a claimed 10x to 50x compression for most datasets. Oracle says that by using HCC with ZFS or Pillar Axiom arrays its customers can throw out EMC or NetApp storage and cut their data centre storage footprint, energy usage and costs to third, perhaps even a fifth of what they were.

It provides this tasty example: "For a 1PB Oracle data warehouse with networked storage, NAS or SAN, Oracle Storage with Hybrid Columnar Compression delivering 16:1 compression would require only 60TB of capacity while an EMC VNX 5700 with 3:1 database compression would require 334TB of usable capacity and cost over $800,000 – more than 7 times the equivalent Oracle storage system."

In relation to its no-cost Pillar acquisition, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, president Mark Hurd and chairman (and ex-CFO) Jeff Hanlely have been named as defendants in a lawsuit alleging a breach of fiduciary duty, filed by the City of Roseville Employees’ Retirement System.

The suit against Oracle has been placed under seal and no further details are available.

Hybrid Columnar Compression for ZFS Storage Appliances and Axiom arrays comes with an update to Oracle Database 11g Release 2 that has been released at Oracle OpenWorld. ®