As technology to manage data becomes more diverse, Oracle is expanding its view of data management well beyond the SQL database.
This week at the Collaborate 13 Independent Oracle Users Group conference, Oracle announced a lower cost of entry for the Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Rack based on six Sun Sparc servers along with a rack expansion option that can be configured to run the Oracle database, the Oracle NoSQL database and the Hadoop distribution from Cloudera. In addition, for organizations that prefer to pay for those appliances on a monthly fee basis, Oracle is now including Oracle Big Data Appliances as an option under its recently introduced Oracle Infrastructure-as-a-Service program.
At the same time, Oracle this week updated its Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and Oracle Endeca Information Discovery software to add support for a wide variety of data sources and the ability to run on mobile computing devices.
According to George Lumpkin, Oracle vice president of product management for data warehousing, Oracle envisions a world where data warehouses are made up of a mix of database technologies that will include the Oracle, MySQL, Oracle NoSQL databases and the Hadoop distribution from Cloudera.
Both from a performance and practicality standpoint, Lumpkin says Oracle envisions that SQL databases will always be part of the data warehouse mix. Customers already have massive amounts of customer information stored in SQL databases, and the performance of Hadoop is still no match for a SQL database.
Ultimately, Lumpkin says Oracle expects the role of the database administrator (DBA) to evolve in a way that allows them to manage structured and unstructured data using a common management console.
While that enlightened view of the future of the DBA may take a while to play out across most IT organizations, the fact remains that over the long haul, most organizations will not be able to afford dedicated SQL database and Hadoop administrators. Viewed from that perspective, time is on Oracle’s side.
