Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Oracle has begun shipping its new Oracle Big Data Discovery and Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data products.
GoldenGate for Big Data
GoldenGate, acquired by Oracle in 2009, offers a mature set of products that are used for real time replication from system to system, and is in wide use in the industry. The new release enables 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.
“This is a technology that is used every day by thousands and thousands of companies to replicate data from system to system in a real time manner. The new product, Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data, now opens up Hadoop to be one of those environments as well,” said Neil Mendelson. VP, Big Data and Advanced Analytics at Oracle. GoldenGate for Big Data allows real time-streaming of data from not only an Oracle database, but from all the sources that GoldenGate talks to whether that is DB2, Teradata, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP ASE,both structured and unstructured data, to target Hadoop. Whether users choose to leverage the data inside HDFS, Flume, Hive or HBase, it will move that data in a performant manner, reliably and securely, said Mendelson.
Oracle is also delivering GoldenGate for Java, with capabilities to allow programmers in the Hadoop environment to integrate GoldenGate’s ability to move the data into the programs they are writing either in Storm, Spark, Kafka, and other programs, said Mendelson.
Oracle Big Data Discovery - “the Visual Face of Hadoop”
And, with Oracle Big Data Discovery, which has been tagged “the visual face of Hadoop,” Oracle is providing an end-to-end product for finding, exploring, transforming, discovering and sharing big data insights, in order to address another set of challenges in the big data space, said Hari Sankar, group vice president of product management, Oracle. “We are going after what we see as some issues with tapping into the big data assets that our customers have today,” said Sankar.
“At a high level, there are two basic problems - big data as the name suggests has a lot of complexity associated with it," said Sankar. "There is lots of data, most of it is in raw form, there are different types of data, and so people have to invest a lot up-front to find the data, explore the data, prepare it, and transform it. All of that heavy lifting is taking up to 80% of the effort in big data projects, and only 20% is being spent in putting the data to use in terms of getting insights. We think the equation backwards; we think it needs to be 20% in prep and 80% in getting insights and operationalizing. And that is problem number-one.”
View the DBTA webcast, “Introducing Oracle Big Data Discovery: the Visual Face of Hadoop.”
The second problem is that big data tools are too complex for most business users, Sankar said. “The good news about big data is that there are a lot of tools but that is also the bad news. There is an alphabet soup of tools which are all very complex, and not within the reach of bus analysts or business users – so with Big Data Discovery, we are really attacking this set of problems head-on. What we are doing with the brand-new product which we just made generally available is providing a very easy to use, very intuitive visual environment where not just data scientists but also business users and business analysts can do all of the processes that I described, finding big data assets, because just finding them can be challenging.”
Big Data Discovery provides an end-to-end environment that is visual and intuitive and allows business analysts and business users to participate in the big data analytics process, said Sankar. “Informally we like to say our goal is to turn big data into a team sport. Today, I don’t think it is.” By broadening participation and increasing user productivity, Sankar says, the time to value in big data projects can be accelerated, going from months and years, down to days and weeks.
Competitive Pricing
Beyond concerns about productivity and value, Mendelson stressed that with these products, Oracle continues a focus on price that was expressed by Oracle’s executive chairman of the board and CTO Larry Ellison during an event in January. “We recognize that this is an open source, commodity marketplace, and what we are trying to do is bring valuable products to that platform at a very price competitive point, both in terms of initial cost, as well as lifetime cost,” said Mendelson.
Updates to Oracle Big Data SQL and Oracle NoSQL Database
In addition, the company introduced updates to additional big data products. Oracle Big Data SQL 1.1, which provides access to data in Hadoop, NoSQL and Oracle Database, now provides up to 40% faster performance; and Oracle NoSQL Database 3.2.5, which allows developers to build high performance, next generation applications, now provides a low latency RESTful API, as well as other capabilities,
Oracle’s new big data offerings run on the recently announced Oracle Big Data Appliance X5 and Oracle Exadata Database Machine X5, and according to Oracle, extend its vision of enabling 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.