You are holding the first comprehensive book covering the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. You might be holding this book because of your desire to know more about exactly what this technology can do for you, but you and your fellow readers have come to this place from different starting points. You could be investigating the Exadata Database Machine because you are a longtime Oracle user who is curious as to the new capabilities you will get with this platform. Your curiosity may have been sparked by the large amount of publicity around the Exadata Database Machine, from Oracle, the press, and industry analysts. Or you might be approaching Exadata with a fair amount of skepticism, since new platforms that can deliver orders of magnitude of performance improvement are rare, to say the least, in a mature market like the relational database market.

This book should help you understand Exadata technology in a way that will extend your knowledge, validate the publicity (well, at least some of it), and show you how these vaunted performance improvements are actually delivered.

This most basic question will require much of this book to fully explain, but the Exadata Database Machine is a bit like an elephant being approached by blind men. Is Exadata a new type of storage hardware? Is Exadata similar to an appliance built with the latest and greatest hardware components? Is Exadata primarily software that uses hardware components in some new ways? Is Exadata simply an optimally configured Oracle-complete hardware and software stack?