Solaris 11 Express on Oracle Exadata Database Machines Provides Improved Data Warehousing Capabilities

Solaris 11 Express on Oracle Exadata Database

• By Leila Meyer
• 08/11/11

The Oracle Solaris 11 Express operating system is now available on the x86-based Oracle Exadata Database Machines X2-2 and X2-8.

The combination of Oracle Solaris 11 Express running on Oracle Exadata Database Machines enables organizations running Oracle Solaris environments to take advantage of the online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing, and consolidated workload capabilities of the Oracle Exadata Database Machines.

Oracle is targeting this hardware and operating system combination at organizations running large, system-critical database applications and claims that it will enable them to operate up to 10 times faster while improving reliability, scalability, and security.

Key features of Oracle Solaris running on Oracle Exadata include:

• Oracle Solaris Predictive Self-Healing, which diagnoses, isolates, and helps recover from hardware and application faults;
• Oracle Solaris DTrace, which analyzes, tunes, and troubleshoots applications on production systems with minimal impact on performance;
• Fast system updates and reboots;
• Oracle Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression, which provides an average of ten times compression of data warehouse tables;
• Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache, which caches frequently accessed data, enabling faster transaction response times and high throughput; and
• Oracle Exadata Smart Scan, which processes queries at the storage layer to return only relevant rows and columns to the database server.

Oracle Solaris 11 Express is available now and can be downloaded from the Oracle site.