"Oracle Exadata Database Machine X4 aims to provide database administrators a single, centralised and automated environment to manage databases," he said in a statement issued by Oracle. Oracle Exadata was first launched in 2008. Today, there are thousands of such machines powering the largest businesses worldwide, running a wide variety of mission-critical workloads including petabyte data warehouses, real-time OLTP, business applications, global scale e-commerce and online financial trading, the company said. "Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the best platform on which to run the Oracle Database and the X4 release extends that value proposition," said Oracle president Mark Hurd (pic). "As private database clouds grow in popularity, the strengths of Oracle Exadata around performance, availability and quality of service set it apart from all alternatives," he claimed.