Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Advanced Analytics, a new option for Oracle Database 11g that combines Oracle R Enterprise with Oracle Data Mining. Oracle R Enterprise aims to provide enterprise class performance for users of the R statistical programming language, increasing the scale of data that can be analyzed by orders of magnitude using Oracle Database 11g.
According to Oracle, the Oracle Advanced Analytics can be viewed as a follow-up to the announcement of the availability of the Oracle Big Data Appliance - extending that effort by bringing analytics to big data. Oracle Advanced Analytics in conjunction with Oracle Big Data Appliance and Oracle Exadata Database Machine enables Oracle Database 11g to deliver an integrated platform for big data analytics.
With Oracle Advanced Analytics, Oracle is providing more analytics on the database platform, says George Lumpkin, vice president of product management for data warehousing, Oracle. "Organizations have invested in pulling together large data sets into Oracle databases; they have enterprise data warehouses, data marts, large systems that are widely used to bring together and integrate lots of different sources of data. What we are providing are more capabilities and more avenues for those organizations to get value from that data."
With Oracle R Enterprise, R development skills, tools, and scripts can now also run transparently, and scale against data stored in Oracle Database 11g. Oracle says that customer testing of Oracle R Enterprise for big data analytics on Oracle Exadata has shown up to 100x increase in performance in comparison to their current environment. The beta for Oracle R Enterprise was announced at Oracle OpenWorld and has included a diverse range of customers, notes Vaishnavi Sashikanth, vice president of Oracle Advanced Analytics.
According to Oracle, with the new offering, Oracle is providing a comprehensive in-database platform for advanced analytics. Benefits include that:
- By providing direct and controlled access to data stored in Oracle Database 11g, customers can accelerate data analyst productivity while maintaining data security throughout the enterprise.
- Oracle Data Mining provides an extensive set of in-database data mining algorithms that solve a wide range of business problems. These predictive models can be deployed in Oracle Database 11g and use Oracle Exadata Smart Scan to rapidly score huge volumes of data.
- The tight integration between R, Oracle Database 11g, and Hadoop enables R users to write one R script that can run in three different environments: a laptop running open source R, Hadoop running with Oracle Big Data Connectors, and Oracle Database 11g.
- Oracle provides single vendor support for the entire big data platform spanning the hardware stack, operating system, open source R, Oracle R Enterprise and Oracle Database 11g.
- To enable easy enterprise-wide Big Data analysis, results from Oracle Advanced Analytics can be viewed from Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine.
With Oracle Advanced Analytics including Oracle R Enterprise, Oracle is allowing the statistician who is familiar with the R statistical programming language and productive in that environment to still maintain their client environment, while providing access to much larger volumes of data, and also making it easy for the statistician to share the results across the enterprise with all of the users of enterprise data - including those who may not be trained statisticians but want to view the results, Lumpkin says.
For more about Oracle Advanced Analytics, go to www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/advanced-analytics/index.html.