Oracle unveils a new product and upgrades its existing solutions to help businesses put together all the relevant bits of data they have gathered from multiple sources and make use of that data by discovering new insights that will help them improve their business.
On Thursday, Feb. 19, Oracle announced its Big Data Discovery tool, a visualization tool that Oracle touts as the "visual face of Hadoop." Hari Sankar, group vice president of product management at Oracle, said the company hopes to tackle two problems with Big Data Discovery.
Sankar said enterprises are expending around 80 percent of their resources investing in technologies and processes to gather data, prepare it, and transform it but they end up with only 20 percent or less in discovering insights and operationalizing big data. The other problem, Sankar said, is that there is an "alphabet soup" of tools to process big data, which are all very complex and not within the reach of analysts and businesses.
"What we are doing with the brand new product 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," said Sankar.
The goal of Big Data Discovery is to provide an end-to-end environment that is as intuitive as an online shopping website that will allow users to find, explore, transform, discover and share useful insights from big data to make better use of business's time.
Sankar pointed out how the complexity of big data previously required companies to take months or years over their big data projects. The goal of Oracle, he said, is to turn big data processing into days or weeks.
Also new from Oracle is GoldenGate for Big Data. GoldenGate was acquired by the company in 2009 to offer real-time replication of data. The new GoldenGate now includes real-time streaming of unstructured data from heterogeneous transactional systems into big-data systems such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive, Apache HBase and Apache Flume.
Neil Mendelson, Oracle vice president of big data and advanced analytics, said GoldenGate makes it possible to replicate data from one system to another and have it delivered in "whatever form you want."
Rounding out Oracle's update portfolio is Big Data SQL, which Oracle said now has tighter integration and 40 percent faster performance in providing access to data in Hadoop, NoSQL and Oracle Database. Also announced is a new release for NoSQL, which is said to have predictable low latency, a RESTful API, and Thrift-based C API. Oracle's NoSQL Database is integrated into the Oracle Big Data platform.
