Oracle rolls out 'Big Data' appliance

IDG News Service - Oracle unveiled the Big Data Appliance, the newest addition to its line of products that combine software and hardware, during the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday.

"Big data" is an industry buzzword that refers generally to the massive amounts of information generated by websites, sensors and other sources apart from traditional enterprise applications.

The new appliance includes a distribution of the open-source Hadoop programming framework, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, a distribution of the R open-source statistical analysis software, and the Oracle NoSQL database, according to a statement.

"There's a lot of data, and a lot of it has very low business value. There's only a few nuggets that people want to find," Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies, told press and analysts. Hadoop and other tools can distill that data down to something useful, and it can then be loaded into a data warehouse, particularly one powered by Oracle's Exadata appliance, for further analysis, he said.

NoSQL refers to a growing set of database technologies that can be defined by what they omit, such as "SQL, joins, strong analytic alternatives to those, and some forms of database integrity," analyst Curt Monash said recently. "If you leave all four out, and you have a strong scale-out story, you're in the NoSQL mainstream."

The Oracle NoSQL database is a "distributed, highly scalable, key-value database" that is "easy to install, configure and manage, supports a broad set of workloads and delivers enterprise-class reliability backed by enterprise-class Oracle support," according to an Oracle statement.

It is based on Oracle's Berkeley DB product. "Berkeley DB is probably the most popular key-value store out there on the Web," but it uses a single index, Mendelsohn said. For the NoSQL database, Oracle "turned it from a single index to a distributed implementation, where you could have maybe 100 indexes," he said.

Like Berkeley DB, the NoSQL database will be available in both open-source and commercial versions. The latter will probably gain premium features over time, Mendelsohn said.

Meanwhile, Oracle recognizes that administrators and developers may not be familiar with programming models like Hadoop, Mendelsohn said.

"Hadoop as it currently stands is a very niche technology," according to Mendelson. "Everybody's talking about it, but who in our enterprise installed base can use something like this?"

That's why tools like the data-integrator adapter and loader for Hadoop are so important, since they help bridge that skills gap, he said.

"Have we done enough [with Hadoop tooling]? I don't think we're there yet, but we've made some good steps," Mendelsohn added.