Exasol in my Pocket

I’m out in Berlin at the Exasol Xperience 2016 customer/partner event – good fun, interesting people, great product announcements from Exasol on version 6 and beyond… but since they announced us (Atheon Analytics) as winners of their Smartest Solution partner award, everyone wants to know what the Exasol in my Pocket device is. So let me explain…

It’s really a rather (embarrassingly) simple idea – scalability should (IMHO) mean “go small” as well as “go large”, and whilst Exasol is renowned for being awesome at incredible scale, I wondered how it would work at the other end of the scale… in a device which would fit in my pocket. The answer is, perhaps unsurprisingly, really rather well; so the Exasol in my Pocket device is just Exasol Community Edition running in a virtual machine on an Intel NUC, itself running the freely available Ubuntu and VirtualBox. If you want to build one yourself, you will need:

1. The kit itself – I built mine back in September 2015 for around £400 + tax, from the following kit list:

   

   … you can probably get all of that for less money now, or a higher-spec device – if you *can* get more RAM then this would be a good idea (hint: future free Exasol editions will be able to take take advantage of it!)

2. Put it together – I don’t plan to write line-by-line instructions (sorry!), as this intended as a quick post… but I could be persuaded if anyone really needs it – it really is very straightforward (plug the drives and RAM into the box!)
3. Install an operating system of your choice – again, plenty of websites out there on how to install a free Linux install; I used the then-current Ubuntu 64-bit desktop
4. Install VirtualBox – you can do this directly (and automatically) from the Software Center on Ubuntu desktop
5. Download the Exasol Community Edition virtual machine and import the appliance file (.ova) that you receive
6. Congratulations, you now have an Exasol in my Pocket device!

Really, that’s it… now go, get analysing, have fun. Go.