Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is not backing off from the stiff market competition for Database In-Memory against Microsoft, IBM and SAP with the release of a new product offering that he claims can deliver intense performance boosts and accelerate data analysis without the need for application changes.
Ellison held a press conference Tuesday saying the new product offering could overtake all its competitors in a year. The release of new in-memory option is said to be a move for Oracle to beef up the demand for its software products.
"There are other in-memory databases but they don't scale out very well, or at all," says Ellison. "It's going to make everything a lot simpler. You can use your transactional system as a data warehouse."
Oracle's Tim Shetler, vice president of product management, explains that the Database In-Memory provides a dual-format architecture that brings about transaction processing workloads and advanced analytics on one database. He also claims the new option is the most complete application, for the reason that it’s not only an in-memory database alongside the current functionality of Oracle database, but an integration of all infrastructure one could expect from a database guaranteeing “transactional integrity, security and robustness.”
SAP spokeswoman Amit Sinha, however, says Ellison’s presentation on the new Database In-Memory didn’t impress her.
"Thanks for the imitation but it's a dual and complex approach, whereas Hana remains a single copy of data - simple, elegant, fast and delivering transformational impact for thousands of customers/startups today," says Sinha, also a senior vice president of platform marketing at SAP. "Hana is natively parallel and runs on commodity Intel boxes and is not reliant on big proprietary SMP boxes to achieve performance."
Meanwhile, market analysts think that Oracle’s new in-memory product is long overdue.
"They really have to make a response to SAP with HANA now. They've had 10c for a long time, which was the in-memory capabilities, but compared with HANA it makes Oracle look a little bit lame," says Quocirca senior researcher Clive Longbottom. "With so many other companies now coming through with accelerated in-memory analytics capabilities using server-side SSD and large DIM arrays, Oracle is beginning to look a bit long in the tooth."
Recall that Ellison first announced the Database In-Memory product of Oracle during the OpenWorld conference in September 2013. Yet the new in-memory of Database 12c will be out in the market only in July this year. It will be offered on all systems where Database 12c can run, and not only on Oracle-engineered systems as well as on systems shipped by Oracle. Pricing hasn’t been disclosed yet as of this time.
