Oracle Announces Oracle Database In-Memory Option to Accelerate Analytics, Data Warehousing, Reporting and OLTP

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had a message Sunday that applied equally to the sailing team he’s bankrolling and to new products he unveiled: Faster and more reliable is better.

In a speech to kick off a big Oracle conference in San Francisco, Ellison discussed the launch of a new database that stores information on memory chips rather than disk drives. "This is pure in-memory columnar technology," Ellison continued, explaining that means no logging and very little overhead on data changes while the CPU core scans local in-memory columns.

Oracle has long been a dominant provider of databases, and sells a variety of other business application programs. But critics say the company’s future is clouded by the rise of newer types of Web-accessible software that typically don’t require companies to maintain their own computer server

The new Oracle Database In-Memory Option to Oracle Database 12c dramatically accelerates database performance enabling new business insights, real-time decision making, and much faster online transaction processing response times without changes to existing applications. Using the Oracle Database In-Memory Option, decades of IT investments become immediately more valuable.

Every application that runs on Oracle Database 12c can automatically and transparently take advantage of Oracle Database In-Memory Option. Existing applications will retain full functionality while experiencing effortless speedups. New applications can be developed that were previously impractical due to performance limitations.

All of Oracle Database's leading reliability, scalability, availability and security technologies work transparently with Oracle Database In-Memory Option, bringing Oracle's mature technologies developed over decades of joint work with thousands of leading banks, telecoms and e-commerce sites to in-memory computing.

Oracle's unique "dual-format" approach enables real-time ad-hoc analytics on live transactional data while also accelerating OLTP. Data is maintained in both the existing Oracle row format, and a new purely in-memory column format optimized for analytical processing. Both formats are simultaneously active and transactionally consistent. The Oracle database automatically uses the new in-memory column format for analytic queries and the existing row format for OLTP operations.

The new in-memory columnar format eliminates the need for expensive to maintain analytic indexes and therefore greatly accelerates OLTP operations.

Oracle Database In-Memory Option simplifies development and management and lowers costs by eliminating the need for separate databases and data structures that have traditionally been required to achieve good analytic performance.