Friday, September 18, 2009

Selling pre-owned cars (and Oracle Exadata)

The video of the Exadata v2 launch webcast is now up. I wrote earlier this week about this event. Of that video I especially liked the first few minutes because they reminded me of the Interboot which starts this weekend here where I live. The entire video also reminded me of how used or "pre-owned" cars are sold.

To impress prospective buyers a salesman would point out that the car does not have just 4 wheels like every other car around, but even 5 or even 6. It would not just have one sun roof, but three, not 4 doors, but 7. It is the best, the fastest, the best, and to top it of, the best. It wouldn't matter whether it makes sense in terms of the big picture, only whether some parts are impressive. And don't even try asking such a sales guy about the price. You wouldn't get a straight answer, at least not that easily.

Switching back to the video, I highly recommend watching it - especially on a Friday. Regarding cost of the Exadata package, here is a closer look. For the big picture, you should ask yourself about what is happening to those customers who bought into the (now dead) Oracle/HP cooperation? Why not just use SSD disks instead of a cache? Why not SPARC instead of Intel? Does RAC really scale to Petabytes? And why sailing and an ocean of tears as introduction...?