Oracle Appliance Gets Tools To Work With NoSQLOracle Appliance Gets Tools To Work With NoSQL

10 Lessons Learned By Big Data Pioneers

Oracle co-President Mark Hurd highlighted Oracle's "Year of Innovation," including the introduction of an Exalytics business intelligence appliance, in his address to an estimated 45,000 Oracle OpenWorld attendees in San Francisco Monday.

Oracle has introduced more new technology in 2011 than it did in 2010, Hurd asserted. In doing so, it continues to focus on producing "the best of breed solutions for every layer of the technology stack," then integrating the pieces, Hurd said. Much of his talk focused on the new Exalytics analytics appliance that was geared to execute OLAP and MOLAP, or online application processing or multi-dimensional online application processing, for deriving business intelligence.

"You're going to hear a lot about cloud at this conference, public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud," Hurd added, although Oracle remains focused on its CPU- and disk-packed appliances as its claimed implementation of a cloud computing architecture.

[ Major vendors are focusing on Big Data. Read EMC Tries To Unify Big Data Analytics ]

Hurd also showed a video clip showing his co-president, Safra Catz, saying, "We are big data. We are also the cloud." The statements show how much Oracle has gotten over its earlier reluctance to refer to cloud computing. At its 2010 OpenWorld, it made a tentative embrace of the cloud as CEO Larry Ellison outlined a description of what cloud computing meant to Oracle--basically virtualized applications running on clustered hardware, but not in a multi-tenant mode. Today, as Oracle refers to cloud within its product line, it is still referring to databases and applications running on its x86-based Exadata and Exalogic appliances.

Oracle has made one move that takes it a step closer to cloud-oriented software. In a talk following Hurd's, Thomas Kurian, Oracle executive VP for development, added the detail that the Exalytics appliance will work with open source Hadoop. That fact had not been disclosed by his boss, CEO Larry Ellison, in Ellison's welcome address to the attendees the night before that aired many Exalytics' details.

The Hadoop data sorting and management system was pioneered at Yahoo. Hadoop provides a file system that can be used in distributing both data and queries to the data over a server cluster so that the required processing occurs on a node close to where the data is located. Hadoop is often used in online gaming or analysis systems that require dealing with thousands or hundreds of thousands of users at a time.

The addition tools to work with Hadoop will allow the Exalytics appliance to move beyond relational business intelligence operations and into the more rough and tumble realm of big data handling with NoSQL systems. Oracle will supply tools for managing Hadoop and using it to load an Oracle database system with results garnered by Hadoop, Kurian said in his morning address.

Oracle is building appliances for business for the same reason that consumers like to use iPhones and iPads, Kurian explained. "The hardware is optimized for the software. We're enabling the same thing for business systems," he said.

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