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Taking stock of Oracle's Big Data arsenal

By Sachin Ghai
Oracle just concluded its big pompous paid showcase event called Oracle Open World. Big Data occupied limelight right from kick off to the closing. There were a few major announcements done through the week and some of them like additional security for big data appliance were just hype rather than major technical breakthrough. Lets attempt to get a quick analysis on what Oracle has in store for us and what it does not.

Oracle’s Big Data offering constituents:

Listed below are key constituents to Oracle’s Big Data offering for its customers:
Oracle NoSQL Database
Horizontally Scaled, Key-Value Database for Web Services and Cloud

Oracle Database
Oracle Database 11g features a wide range of options to meet specific customer requirements in the areas of performance and availability, security and compliance, data warehousing and analytics, unstructured data and manageability.With Oracle Database 12c, the company has built an in-memory database competitor to SAP HANA.

Oracle Big Data Appliance
Pre-integrated full rack configuration with 18 of Oracle's Sun servers and combines Cloudera Hadoop distribution, Oracle NoSQL Database and Big Data connectors.

Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition
Flagship ETL/ELT. High-performance bulk data movement and data transformation.

Oracle Big Data Connectors
Software suite that integrates Apache Hadoop with Oracle software, including Oracle Database, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, and Oracle Data Integrator.

Oracle Advanced Analytics
Extends the Oracle database into a comprehensive advanced analytics platform through two major components: Oracle R Enterprise and Oracle Data Mining.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine
Next generation Database Machine, Oracle Exadata, combines massive memory and low-cost disks to deliver high performance and petabyte scalability for all applications including Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), Data Warehousing (DW) and consolidation of mixed workloads.

Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine
Engineered System for advanced analytics which provides in-memory analytics software and hardware optimised to work together along with advanced data visualisation/exploration to quickly provide actionable insight from large amounts of data.

The + and –

A quick snapshot on where Oracle can win and where it can lose in comparison to other Big Data vendors.

Oracle winners
Oracle losers
Industry leading relational database
Exadata and other offerings still not compatible with all Oracle DB versions and non Oracle DB
Strong tie up with Cloudera (Hadoop distribution company) and high acquisition possibility
Utilizes connector Hadoop architecture without leveraging native support
With major acquisitions in the past, Oracle now has hardware, software, application services
Finds tough holding ground in heterogeneous vendor software environment
Provides in-memory computing capabilities
Flash cache only available for OLTP till now
Has rich BI and visualization layer
Has only limited advanced predictive modeling capabilities (like R)
Provides convenient mobile interface
Virtualization still a big question for Exadata
Has advanced BI appliance called Exalytics
New SPARC servers require learning curve on Solaris administration
Now offers Cloud deployments
Oracle hardware license list price do not cover Software, support cost; TCO can shoot up as high as 10x on total bundle
Aggressive management vision and marketing budgets
CEO can ditch the Oracle Open World customers for other passions

Larry Ellison off at America's cup sailing competition while audience expect him at Oracle Open World
(original cartoon author: unknown)

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