What does the Oracle DBA need to know about NoSQL? Charles Pack, technical director, CSX Technology, answered that question in a session at Data Summit 2016 titled "Oracle NoSQL for the Oracle RDBMS DBA." The Oracle NoSQL Database offers benefits and Oracle DBAs have the opportunity to add it to their portfolios, according to Pack, who covered where the NoSQL database fits in within the overall Oracle ecosystem. "It is not a replacement for all your databases. It is a piece in the puzzle," emphasized Pack.
Pack gave his presentation as part of the IOUG track at Data Summit, and covered the variety of NoSQL databases available. These, he said, include document databases which usually pair each key with a complex data structure which is called a document. Documents can contain key-array pairs or key-value pairs or even nested documents. There are also wide-column stores which are optimized for queries over large datasets, and instead of rows store columns of data together. Graph stores store information about graphs, networks, such as social connections. And finally, in key-value stores, every single item is stored as a key-value pair. Key-value stores are the simplest among NoSQL databases, he said.
Oracle NoSQL database is a key-value store based on BerkeleyDB, which Oracle acquired in 2006. Oracle NoSQL was initially launched in 2011, and the current version is 12.1.3.5.2, released in December 2015, said Pack, who noted that there are community and an enterprise versions.
Oracle NoSQL in the Oracle Ecosystem
Oracle NoSQL is a component of the Oracle Big Data Appliance, and offers integration with Hadoop HDFS, and others, as well as integration with Oracle RDBMS as an external table. It enables users to stream, acquire, and store large quantities of data, as well as extract and forward data to RDBMS and analytics engines. "The barrier to entry to NoSQL is almost non-existent. So, if you are an Oracle DBA you can add this over the weekend to your set of knowledge," said Pack.
“What does the Oracle DBA need to know?” he asked. There is a tremendous amount of educational information available and “you can be up and running in a matter of hours.” The NoSQL DB Community Edition software is available for download at www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/database-technologies/nosqldb/downloads/index.html, said Pack
In addition, Pack cited NoSQL for Dummies, 1st Edition, and the Oracle Learning Library, among other sources for information.
For anyone who is not yet familiar with Oracle Database 12c R2, said Pack, they should know that they "are going to see a deeper and broader connection to the big data products and to NoSQL. It is better to learn it now than to have to learn it after you have got 12c R2 in your shop.”
Pack has made the slides from his presentation available at http://conferences.infotoday.com/documents/245/C105_Pack.pdf. Many additional presentations from Data Summit 2016 have been made available for review at www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2016/Presentations.aspx.