More on Exalytics: How much user data fits?

Sorry… this is a little geeky…

The news and blogs on Exalytics tend to say that Exalytics is an in-memory implementation with 1TB of memory. They then mention, often in the same breath, that the TimesTen product which is the foundation for Exalytics now supports Hybrid Columnar Compression which might compress your data 5X or more. This leaves the reader to conclude that an Exalytics Server can support 5TB of user data. This is not the case.

If you read the documentation (here is a summary…) a 1TB Exalytics server can allocate 800GB to TimesTen of which half may be allocated to store user data. The remainder is work space… so 400GB uncompressed is available for user data. You might now conclude that with 5X compression there is 2TB of compressed user data supported. But I am not so sure…

In Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression is a feature of the Storage Servers. It is unknown to the RAC layer. The compression allows the Storage Servers to retrieve 5X the data with each read significantly improving the I/O performance of the subsystem. But the data has to be decompressed when it is shipped to the RAC layer.

I expect that the same architecture is implemented in TimesTen… The data is stored in-memory compressed… but decompressed when it moves to the work storage. What does this mean?

If, in a TimesTen implementation without Hybrid Columnar Compression, 400GB of work space in memory is required to support a “normal” query workload against 400GB of user data then we can extrapolate the benefits of 5X compressed data as follows:

• x of user data compressed uses x/5 of memory plus x of work space in memory… all of which must fit into 800GB

This resolves to x = 667GB… a nice boost for sure… with some CPU penalty for decompressing.

So do not jump to the conclusion that Hybrid Columnar Compression in TimesTen of 5X allows you to put 5TB of user data on a 1TB Exalytics box… or even that it allows you to load 2TB into the 400GB user memory… the real number may be under 1TB.