By Cat Yong
During his Sunday keynote at Oracle Open World 2013, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison talked about row formats, column formats, analytics index and so on; basically pretty technical database speak.
He had kicked off the five-day global annual event with announcements of new products and solutions that revolved largely around big data and analytics, data warehousing, and that are spearheaded by in-memory technology. (Other product announcements can be found here).
What followed was announcement of an In-Memory option to their Oracle 12c database which Oracle had introduced last July. The in-memory version which is still in pilot phase right now, offers the benefit of customers not having to rewrite apps to begin using them in the in-memory Oracle 12c version.
Overall feelings
But, Ellison also left many wishing that he would link the many, many times improvement in database performance to more tangible and solid business outcomes. More pertinent: how big of an adoption rate is big data and analytics, the main application being pushed with the new in-memory database, seeing in the APAC region?
IDC’s Sandra Ng opined, “I think that generally, very few customers would care about how many times better performance it is, they care more about business outcomes and how it would directly impact the business.”
Ellison may have also emphasised on the wrong kind of speed during his keynote. Having capability to perform at ‘ungodly’ speeds come to naught if it means being very, very good and fast at doing nothing useful for the business.
Ng said, “I think transaction processing speed is the more critical element. Transaction processing speed is about closing the deal, invoicing, revenue assurance and so on. That can actually resonate better (with customers) in terms of business outcomes and business goals.”
With the product announcement merely 3 days old at time of writing, conversations around it, also have not arrived at a definite conclusion yet, if ever.
But Ng shared, “What I can tell you however is that speed to market is very important in the Asian context,” citing India and China as two classic examples of countries that would be impacted by this.
Oracle President Mark Hurd had described migrating to 12c in-memory as simple as flipping a switch, without customers having to rewrite a single line of existing code of their applications, to get performance benefit. “This is a big deal for our 400, 000 customers to gain incremental improvement.”
The landscape
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| This was sighted near above Oracle Open World 2013 event site, Yerba Buena Gardens, on the second day of OOW |
Currently, SAP is seen to be a direct competitor to Oracle’s in-memory 12c database. When asked to comment about this, Oracle President Mark Hurd had responded, “I don’t like it when Exadata or the in-memory option gets compared with SAP’s HANA because I don’t think they are comparable.
“HANA has to be programmed. What we have has nothing to do with that. It is about moving current apps from here to there, without rewriting anything. All the magic is below the database layer!”
Enterprise IT News was in San Francisco as Oracle’s guest to Oracle Open World 2013 from September 22nd till September 27th, 2013
