R.L. Polk sees 10x query improvement with Oracle Exadata V2

Five years ago, way before there was even a machine called Oracle Exadata, it would take R.L. Polk & Company five minutes to run automotive information reports to its customers, and that was impressive enough. But the Web has made people as impatient as drivers in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

R.L. Polk gathers statistical vehicular information and sells it to customers, and has been doing it since 1921. They work with auto manufacturers, for instance, to get recall notices out to drivers. The company does a couple million transactions a day.

“The Internet has made everyone think that everything should be instant,” Douglas Miller, database development and operations director at the company, said at Oracle OpenWorld 2010. “So now five minutes seemed like an eternity. We wanted something to bring it down to the 10 to 30 second range.”

When the HP-based Exadata version 1 came out two years ago, Miller said R.L. Polk was interested, but they just weren’t able to put the key in the ignition. Oracle Exadata V2 changed that.

In this video interview, Miller explains the query improvements he’s seen with Oracle Exadata V2. He talks about Exadata’s hybrid columnar compression and flash cache has caused R.L. Polk to remove all the indexes off its materialized views. Finally, he talks about why R.L. Polk picked Oracle Exadata over competitors such as Netezza and Teradata.