| The rumours I've heard in the (UK) press indicate a Sequent hot-box.
I think I've read that they've entered into an OEM agreement.
Don't get too worked up about a very high tps rate. That would
be the usual "debit/credit" with read-only, all-in-memory, etc tweaks.
Oracle have been looking for hardware to sell themselves for a while,
and this reinforces their main strategy: they like accounts to have
hardware from many vendors.
If you want to frighten a salesperson who is thinking of selling
VAXs and Oracle, tell him/her about Oracle hardware; this can swing
them towards Rdb.
|
| I was passed this news recently-
NCUBE - Two announcements were to be made on June 19:
o An agreement with Oracle through which Oracle hopes to yield a
1000-transaction/sec. commercial database system by 1Q90.
o The NCube-2
The following information is pre-announcement:
Oracle may take an equity position in NCube. Oracle and NCube are
currently testing a version of the Oracle DBMS running on the new
NCube-2 system. This is one of the first times a major business-
oriented applications package has been ported to a parallel
processing computer.
The NCube-2, which runs Unix V.3, will require a specialized DBMS
interface in addition to the standard porting work to be done by
Oracle. Oracle will port its SQL*Forms and SQL*Plus tools as well
as version 6.0 of its DBMS engine to the NCube-2. Oracle is
expected to promise that applications developed for other Oracle
systems will be fully portable to the NCube environment.
One NCube processor can access up to 64 MBytes of RAM, allowing
NCube-2 to maintain many gigabytes of data in RAM, according to
sources. NCube rates its internal data communications at over 70
Gbytes/sec. This high availability makes it ideal for I/O intensive
database applications, which frequently are bound more by the limits
of the I/O channel than raw processing power. The entire DBMS and
its files could be stored in RAM, making data access virtually
instantaneous.
The massively parallel structure of the NCube-2 also would make it
ideal for a multiprocessing DBMS architecture such as that promised
for the Oracle version 6.0 environment.
Oracle will bring to NCube prestige, financing, and a direct sales
force giving NCube exposure to key commercial and government
markets. NCube is a six-year-old company with only 33 people.
Having Oracle's front-end tools and SQL DBMS will also help NCube
gain respectability in the commercial market, which has been
reluctant to commit to massively parallel machines because of a lack
of good applications development environments.
The NCube 2 will have up to 8,192 processors. NCube says it can
execute 100 Billion instructions/sec. or 27 Gflops. There may be
512 Gbytes of memory and 16 trillion bytes of disk storage.
Shipments should begin in July.
{Computer Systems News, 6/19/89, Datamation, 6/1/89}
|
| The following is from Digital Review, 26th June 1989. page 3. I know how
Digital Review is know for its accuracy and love for Digital, and I also know
that Oracle makes noises like this all the time, but it's still depressing.
For non-US readers, a Tootsie Roll is a candy/sweet a little like soft toffee,
and is pretty much an American institution.
Beware! the puns come thick and fast...
Tootsie Rollover: Oracle Gives DEC a Licking
by Gene Grygo
Not everyone has been enjoying the sweet taste of success at Tootsie
Roll Industries, where DEC took a recent licking.
For the last several weeks, Oracle has run an ad campaign that touts
how much Tootsie Roll executives like their Oracle Financials accounting
software.
The problem for DEC salespeople is that when Tootsie Roll bought Oracle
Financials, the company wasted little time in switching from a VAX 8250
running VMS to a Unix-based superminicomputer from Sequent Computer
Systems of Beaverton, Ore.
The overriding factors in "the Tootsie rollover" were price and the
chance to port applications based on an Oracle database to the new Unix
system, said William Gedvilas, Tootsie Roll's MIS director.
"We got the Sequent S81 for a lot less than a VAX 6240 or VAX 6230.
DEC responded with their best shot, but the price was out of this
world.", he said.
The price of the Sequent machine was one quarter of the price for DEC's
system package, he added.
Tootsie Roll's MIS department wants to establish an MRP (materials
resource planning) system by 1992 to automate the manufacturing of
Tootsie Roll goodies, he said.
Maybe by then, DEC salespeople won't have to suck so many lollipops.
|