How In-Memory Technology Can Transform Your Business

By Praveen Thakur, Vice President, Technology Business Unit, Oracle ASEAN

Chief Executive Offices (CEOs) know that raw speed brings business advantages. Blink-of-an-eye analytics and split-second transactions make companies more agile and better able to engage today’s on-the-go customers. Yet, how do companies accelerate the two vital functions—analytics and transactions? The answer is the new database technology that takes advantage of computer system memory to execute faster than ever.

Databases are the nerve center of businesses—the place where data on customers, products, inventory, and supply chains, and finance gets stored and managed. The gains of being able to accelerate the database performance will be reflected in the business itself.

To do so, IT teams must contend with the rule of database management. The amount of data pouring into databases keeps growing. Terabytes swell into petabytes, and petabytes into exabytes. Whether this is a problem or an opportunity is a matter of strategy and execution, and having the right IT infrastructure to not merely support the workload, but exploit it.

In-memory is the perfect solution. The basic idea is that the database does more of its work in system memory than on disk drives eliminating all of those trips back and forth to disk. It’s like the difference between walking out your front door and driving down the street to get the newspaper (disk drive) or picking up the newspaper from the table in front of you (in-memory).

In-memory technology has been available from a variety of vendors, primarily as a high performance solution for specific requirements. Oracle, for example, offers the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. Now, in-memory is about to jump the divide into the mainstream. Businesses of all sizes and across industries will soon be able to capitalize on the performance gains that have been enjoyed by early adopters.

Recently, Oracle introduced the software that supercharges the performance of Oracle Databases by applying an in-memory column store format. Named as Oracle Database In-Memory, the software will be made available as an option to the widely used Oracle Database. Oracle Database In-Memory will run on the same computer systems that companies use today with their Oracle Databases and support the business applications they currently use without modification.  This means that Chief Information Officers (CIO) can leverage their existing IT infrastructures and investments to get the advantages of an in-memory database environment.

Oracle Database In-Memory will boost query performance by orders of magnitude. Database queries are the foot soldiers of analytics and, by extension, of corporate decision making. Organisation can retrieve results at the speed of thought. Furthermore, Oracle Database In-Memory will accelerate transactions with a dual-format approach that simultaneously organizes data in both rows, for optimal transaction performance, and columns, for high speed analytics.

Based on our conversations with one Oracle customer, business users are now facing customers whose expectations are set by an always-on, always-connected omni-channel world.  The need for immediate answers is imperative in an increasingly impatient world.  Business users now aspire to having all of the data at fingertips, in order to develop higher quality insights and deliver more personalized experiences.

In a nutshell, the new Oracle In-Memory Database enable what has long been a goal for many organizations –the ability to act in real time and faster decision-making—means companies can run their business better, and translate real-time responsiveness into a better customer experience. Real-time processes will reach into every nook and cranny of the business, as enterprise applications such as Oracle JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel take advantage of the in-memory performance gains.