The Oracle NoSQL Database, which was announced at Oracle OpenWorld, is now available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Oracle also said that its new engineered system, the Oracle Big Data Appliance, an optimized platform for running the Oracle NoSQL Database and Oracle's other big data offerings that was also unveiled at OpenWorld, will ship in Q1 of the 2012 calendar year.
With a key-value data model, the Oracle NoSQL Database facilitates efficient storage of data in a simple, flexible format, and is particularly well suited for rapid development and deployment of applications, according to Oracle.
The new Oracle NoSQL Database is based on the Java edition of Berkeley DB database, technology acquired by Oracle in 2006, Marie-Anne Neimat, vice president of database development at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing, but is a brand new product. The existing technology was used because "it does exactly what we need," she explains, but as a result of many enhancements, the new offering is a "brand new, distributed, scalable, highly available NoSQL database product."
In Oracle's view, many current NoSQL offerings make writing applications difficult by providing only "eventual consistency," where multiple copies of data are "eventually" updated. This leaves the responsibility for generating code to handle consistency with the application developer. In contrast, the company says, the Oracle NoSQL Database manages consistency and offers developers configurable consistency options to meet different application needs.
According to Oracle, key benefits of its new NoSQL Database include
- Commercial-Grade Software and Support - Backed by Oracle Support, Oracle NoSQL Database also offers customers a single point of contact for trouble-shooting issues and maintaining continuous availability of critical database instances.
- Scalable throughput and bounded latency - Oracle NoSQL Database scales almost linearly, providing customers with reliable, high performance under a wide range of workloads and use cases.
- Simple Programming and Operational Model - Simple major + sub key and value data paradigm and more relaxed support of ACID transactions provides flexibility of programming for large datasets in horizontally scaled environments.
- Easy Management - With a web-based console and accessible APIs, the Oracle NoSQL Database is easy to manage. The offering automatically manages and monitors topology, load balancing, performance, events and alerts.
With the NoSQL Database, Neimat says, Oracle is targeting existing Oracle enterprise customers that want a robust product from a company that caters to the enterprise, knows how to manage massive amounts of enterprise data that has to be available and reliable, and can also provide additional integrated technologies. The new system is easy to use and comes with a console that makes it easy to set up, says Neimat.
The combination of the Oracle NoSQL Database and complementary big data offerings, enables Oracle to provide end-to-end management of data, starting with the NoSQL Database, moving the data into Hadoop, and from Hadoop into Oracle - and Oracle is providing tools to do the data movement easily and efficiently, Neimat says. "Our customers have been asking for this and we are delivering."
More information is available about the Oracle NoSQL Database.