Exascale is something I haven’t worked much yet apart from doing some testing, but for me it feels like something major looming in and that will change the Oracle Database storage layout with Exascale storage.
Ok, so why? Feels like we’ve had ASM for ages and it serves us well, but at the same time databases have grown BIG. Even when you’re using Exadata, the requirements keep growing and (again just pure opinion), there’s limit what you can do with software updates and adding newer hardware components.
It looks like Oracle is optimizing Exascale not only for data, but also for operational things like cloning. If you’ve ever cloned a 100TB database in OCI Exadata or similar, you’ve had to think either reserving lot of time or doing some magic with SPARSE diskgroups or ACFS etc. There are some super interesting benchmarks out there where folks are cloning 10TB databases on Exascale in seconds!
When provisioning storage vaults, you can also configure limits for cache. The storage management is also moved to the storage layer and not coupled with database nodes like with ASM.
You can take thin clones of a PDB on the same CDB, different CDB or clone the whole CDB or you can clone from standby DB etc. And only the changed blocks add on storage on the same Exascale Vault (ok not a fan of the name Vault here), providing you huge amount of storage savings.
Besides storage, you can provision Exascale as it’s own VM cluster in the cloud, without provisioning full Exadata infrastructure. That way you won’t add on the dedicated Exadata costs but only pay for the cluster ECPUs and used storage. I’m eager to start designing systems either with separate Exascale clusters or Exadata Infrastructure using Exascale storage, how do you for example plan the storage vaults?
The one drawback and reason we’re not seeing Exascale so much is that to get all benefits, you’ll need to be on 26ai database. Oracle has added support for 19c database, but there are limitations if you go through the documentation as well. So pay attention!
Summary
Second on my countdown list was Oracle Exascale and Exascale storage. My bet is that in few years this will be the standard on Oracle storage and we’ll really start seeing benefits on the solution when people get to Oracle Database 26ai. The cool thing is also that you can deploy it in any of the Multicloud locations!
Some good links to read: https://docs.oracle.com/en/engineered-systems/exadata-database-machine/exscl/what-is-oracle-exascale.html
https://blogs.oracle.com/exadata/exascale-storage-fundamentals
https://blogs.oracle.com/exadata/advantages-of-exadata-exascale