Database market is being shaken up

About three years ago began SAP to get users on board with Hana in-memory technology. Customers benefit from improvements in performance, which traditional disk-based Databases and bring more flexibility to the IT structures, the Walldorf never tire of touting the benefits of the new technology.

The company's strategy seems to be paying off, as more and more companies are asking the Hana-The new technology is being offered by the software giant and is ready to be used in the business environment.

The large database manufacturers such as Oracle and IBM take the offensive of the Walldorf but so far with composure. Hardly any customer will completely abandon their established Databases say goodbye and focus entirely on the SAP-switch platform.

In-memory technology andDatabases are not new either and Oracle a pioneer in the field of in-memory, Günther Stürner, Vice President of Sales Consulting at Oracle. What has been missing from the portfolio so far is the concrete implementation of an in-memory columnar...Database.

That will change next year when the database giant makes In-memory available as a paid option for the 12.1.0.1 release of its in-house database system.

Oracle closes to the competition

This means that the company is catching up with its competitors, as already in spring 2013 the IBM with IBM Blu Acceleration, an add-on module to its relational Database DB2 which enables in-memory and column orientation. And in the research facilities of Microsoft the developers are working on in-memory capabilities for the SQL-servers, which are to be upgraded with it before the end of 2013.

At the Oracle OpenWorld now pulled Oracle and announced its new database software, which can use in-memory and work in a column-oriented manner. According to Stürner, column orientation is advantageous when business processes require read accesses, such as those found in analytical applications.

The row orientation, on the other hand, makes more sense for transaction applications that write to a database table. In order to be prepared for all use cases and to make the desired information available in a timely manner, the data in the overall system is to be stored in both row-oriented and column-oriented hybrid form.

With this Oracle a unique selling point, because the hybrid form of storage has not been used by any other provider to date, comments Stürner.

"This allows us to guarantee the best performance for database processes at all times for all applications."

In the future, analytical queries will run a hundred times faster than before. And the speed for transaction processing will double.

Database specialists must collaborate

Before the new technology is introduced, however, companies' database specialists are first called upon. They must do their homework if the new technology is to bring the desired benefits to an organization.

Stürner recommends a kind of specification sheet in which various points are listed. For example, the existing Oracle-infrastructure can continue to be used in order to avoid superfluous investments.

In addition, existing applications must benefit from the new technology without having to be rewritten for it in a time-consuming and costly manner.

The database specialists must also decide which data sets should ultimately be stored in the main memory. Current data can be kept in flash memory, less current data can be kept on various disk storage devices.

What the existing Oracle-Stürner promises that the security and backup features of the existing environment can be used unchanged in the new environment.

The new option can be used in scale-out scenarios, where more machines are added to the cluster. Another option is scale-up. Here, the database computer is increased by additional CPUs.

Deployment scenarios sees Oracle-Representative Günther Stürner to all users who use complex applications for reporting, Business Intelligence use and drive analytics and need to accelerate these applications.

The target group is not only large corporations, but also medium-sized companies that need to perform many complex evaluation processes in real time.