Simeon Dimitriov, an IT manager at M-Tel, an Eastern European telephone company, said in a video interview shown by Oracle that queries and reports generated were 28 times faster. It ran Oracle Database on 2 IBM Power 570 servers connected to a midrange EMC CX3-40 storage array.

LGR Telecommunications Inc. CEO Grant Salmon oversees 220TB of caller records on an HP Superdome Server connected to a Hitachi XP24000 storage array. He said queries involving caller data records that used to take 30 minutes took just a minute when run by a half-size Database Machine.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange's workloads ran between 10 and 15 times faster, and grocer Giant Eagle Inc.'s 5TB sales data warehouse ran 16 times faster, according to Ellison.

Sounds impressive. But take away the stats and marketing talk, and isn't the Database Machine really just what everyone else in the industry calls a data warehousing appliance?

Definitely, but Ellison and HP CEO Mark Hurd studiously avoided using that term. That's not surprising, said Scott Yara, president of Greenplum Inc., a data warehousing appliance vendor. Greenplum, along with Netezza, Datallegro, Teradata all build all-in-one data warehousing products that have been winning customers who are unhappy with Oracle's performance at the high end.

For example, Greenplum counts MySpace, LinkedIn, Skype and the New York Stock Exchange among its users. According to Yara, "a number" of the company's customers have databases larger than 100TB, while two are in the process of deploying Greenplum appliances larger than a petabyte.

Ellison did claim that the Oracle Database Machine can also run conventional OLTP (online transaction processing) workloads faster and that Oracle would provide "benchmarks next time around."

What did Oracle have to say about its competitors?

Ellison took pot shots at NCR Corp. spinoff and long-time data warehousing vendor Teradata Corp., as well as Netezza Corp., perhaps the leading member of the new crop of appliance vendors. Ellison claimed that the Database Machine is faster than a five-rack Teradata 5550 cluster, which he said lacks Oracle's new smart-query features and thus is bogged down by the need to transfer much more data from the storage array to the databases. "Architecturally, [the Teradata 5550] just can't compete," he said.

Netezza has a newer architecture, Ellison said, and thus, like Oracle, it has both big bandwidth and intelligence in its storage servers. The difference? "Ours runs Oracle; theirs does not," he said. Netezza's "overall database capability is very primitive," he said, citing a feature, B-Tree Indexing, that Netezza supposedly lacks. Ellison joked, "Even I studied about it in school, and you know how long ago that was."

Teradata provided a measured reply. But Netezza's president blasted the Oracle-HP products for not being designed "from the ground up" by engineers in the same company, and instead being patched together "with glue and spit."

Ellison, uncharacteristically, didn't attack Microsoft Corp., which leapt into the very-large data warehousing market earlier this year when it bought appliance vendor Datallegro Inc.

How much will Oracle's products set you back?

Oracle wasn't clear about how much a single Exadata would cost. But a fully-loaded Oracle Database Machine lists for US$2.33 million, including the hardware and all of the databases licenses.