News

Oracle Unveils 'New Approach' to Democratizing Big Data

• By David Ramel
• February 19, 2015

Everybody wants to put data scientists out of work.

The latest major vendor to try its hand at democratizing Big Data is Oracle Corp., which today announced a quartet of new products designed "to enable Hadoop, NoSQL, and SQL technologies to work together and be deployed securely in any model -- whether public cloud, private cloud or an on-premises infrastructure."

The new offerings include Oracle Big Data Discovery, Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data, Oracle Big Data SQL 1.1 and Oracle NoSQL Database 3.2.5. They join an ever-expanding universe of tools to put advanced data analytics in the hands of more everyday users.

Oracle Big Data Discovery helps users find, explore, transform, discover and share Big Data insights, the company said of the new product now generally available. In introducing it via a Web event today, Oracle exec Omri Traub said, "think of it as the visual face of Hadoop."

In looking at the variety of customers trying to analyze Big Data with existing tools and staff, he said that Oracle concluded "a fundamental new approach" was needed.

That new approach was necessitated by the complexity of the tools and available in-house talent, explained exec Rich Clayton during the event. This led to an "overdependence on a very scarce set of resources," he said.

Clayton said Oracle customer studies found that they spent 80 percent of their time wrestling setting up systems and data, with only 20 percent of their time being available for actually discovering business insights.

To let everyone -- such as typical business users rather than specially trained staffers -- get in on the Big Data action, the company's fundamental new approach reflects the company's vision "to democratize Big Data for everyone, not just data scientists," Clayton said.

Helping do that is the second component, Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data, a technology based on Hadoop that lets customers stream real-time unstructured data from disparate sources into Big Data systems. The targets it supports include Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive, Apache HBase and Apache Flume. "It allows customers to enhance Big Data analytics initiatives by incorporating existing real-time architectures into Big Data solutions, while ensuring their Big Data reservoirs are up-to-date with production systems."

Covering its SQL and NoSQL bases, the company also introduced Oracle Big Data SQL 1.1 and Oracle NoSQL Database 3.2.5.

The former extends the company's flagship SQL database technology to work with Hadoop and NoSQL data stores. With one query, users can access data from all three types of data sources, boosting performance by up to 40 percent over previous editions.

The new release of the NoSQL database, meanwhile, comes with new latency improvements, a RESTful API and a Thrift-based C API. "Building on Oracle Big Data SQL, Oracle NoSQL Database 3.2.5 also supports data definition language (DDL), making it even easier to use SQL to query NoSQL data," the company said.

Oracle announced the products at the Strata + Hadoop World conference underway in San Jose, Calif.