“The design of the boat was

important, but once you’ve stories high; it barely fits under the

of parameters across the trimaran,

collected 10 times per second, so there

got it designed, the whole Golden Gate Bridge. It’s an amazing

were vast amounts of data available thing to see.” for analysis. An hour of sailing

race is down to how the

The wing sail is made of an generates 90 million data points.”

aeronautical fabric stretched over After each day of sailing the boat,

guys can use it.”

a carbon fiber frame, giving it the Burns and his team would meet to —Ian Burns, Design Coordinator for BMW ORACLE Racing three-dimensional shape of a regular

review and share raw data with crew airplane wing. Like an airplane wing, members or boat-building vendors using a Web application built

it has a fixed leading edge and an adjustable trailing edge, which with Oracle Application Express. “Someone in the meeting would

allows the crew to change the shape of the sail during the course of say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could look at some new combination

a race.

of numbers?’ and we could quickly build an Oracle Application “The crew of the USA was the best group of sailors in the world, Express application and share the information during the same

but they were used to working with sails,” says Burns, “Then we meeting,” says Burns. Later, the data would be streamed to Oracle’s

put them under a wing. Our chief designer, Mike Drummond, told Austin Data Center, where Stengard and his team would go to work

them an airline pilot doesn’t look out the window when he’s flying on deeper analysis.

the plane; he looks at his instruments, and you guys have to do the Because BMW ORACLE Racing was already collecting its data in an

same thing.”

Oracle database, Stengard and his team didn’t have to do any extract,

A second ship, known as the performance tender, accompanied transform, and load (ETL) processes or data conversion. “We could

the USA on the water. The tender served in part as a floating just start tackling the analytics problem right away,” says Stengard.

datacenter and was connected to the USA by wireless LAN. “We used Oracle Data Mining, which is in Oracle Database. It gives

“The USA generates almost 4,000 variables 10 times a second,” us many advanced data mining algorithms to work with, so we have

says Burns. “Sometimes the analysis requires a very complicated freedom in how we approach any specific task.”

combination of 10, 20, or 30 variables fitted through a time-based Using the algorithms in Oracle Data Mining, Stengard could

algorithm to give us predictions on what will happen in the next few help Burns and his team learn new things about how their boat was

seconds, or minutes, or even hours in terms of weather analysis.” working in its environment. “We would look, for example, at mast

Like the deeper analysis that Stengard does back at the Austin Data rotations—which rotation works best for certain wind conditions,”

Center, this real-time data management and near-real-time data says Stengard. “There were often complex relationships within the

analysis was done in Oracle Database 11g. “We could download the data that could be used to model the effect on the target—in this

data to servers on the tender ship, do some quick analysis, and feed it case something called velocity made good, or VMG. Finding these

right back to the USA,” says Burns.

relationships is what the racing team was interested in.” “We started to do better when the guys began using the Stengard and his team could also look at data over time and

instruments,” Burns says. “Then we started to make small with an attribute selection algorithm to determine which sensors

adjustments against the predictions and started to get provided the most-useful information for their analysis. “We could

improvements, and every day we were making gains.” identify sensors that didn’t seem to be providing the predictive power

Those gains were incremental and data driven, and they they were looking for so they could change the sensor location or add

accumulated over years—until the USA could sail at three times the sensors to another part of the boat,” Stengard says.

wind speed. Ian Burns is still amazed by the spectacle. Burns agrees that without the data mining, they couldn’t have

“It’s an awesome thing to watch,” he says. “Even with all we have made the boat run as fast. “The design of the boat was important,

learned, I don’t think we have met the performance limits of that but once you’ve got it designed, the whole race is down to how the

beautiful wing.” W

guys can use it,” he says. “With Oracle database technology, we could compare our performance from the first day of sailing to the

Jeff Erickson is a senior editor with Oracle Publishing.

very last day of sailing, with incremental improvements the whole way through. With data mining we could check data against the

NEXT STEPS

things we saw, and we could find things that weren’t otherwise easily observable and findable.”

“The design of the boat was