Oracle Big Data

New solutions bring visualization and real-time integration to big data.

Data is everywhere. Each action and activity performed by a person, auto, machine, or device produces data—data that potentially can be used in any number of ways: improving marketing, advancing health research, providing disaster aid, solving traffic issues, upping sports teams’ performance, aiding law enforcement, and much more.

These new capabilities, coupled with falling data storage costs, represent new opportunities—but new challenges as well, says Paul Sonderegger, Oracle big data strategist.

“The datafication of nearly every activity in commercial, public, and private life affects every tier of the enterprise computing stack, every corner of enterprise computing,” Sonderegger says. “An enterprise’s entire architecture is going to have to evolve.”

Indeed, increasingly complex IT environments slow performance and increase management costs and security risks. Ironically, big data pilot projects can add to that complexity when organizations scale those experiments to production systems. Security issues, access policies, authorization, auditability, and integration with legacy systems and applications come into play.

“When you add new kinds of data management solutions and analytic systems to an IT environment, you may potentially be introducing security gaps,” Sonderegger says. “Identifying and addressing those gaps before going live takes a lot of time.”

That’s one reason why Oracle takes a comprehensive approach to big data, providing pre-integrated, secure, high-performance solutions that preserve a business’s investments in existing technology. Last summer, Oracle introduced Oracle Big Data SQL, which can extend Oracle Database security to the entire big data environment. In January of this year, Oracle also gave enterprises a better and less expensive alternative to building Hadoop clusters.

Adding to its powerful lineup of big data solutions, Oracle recently announced the availability of two new products: Oracle Big Data Discovery, which quickly transforms raw data into easy-to-understand business insight; and Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data, which streams real-time transactional data into big data systems. And in April 2015, a new version of Oracle Data Integrator was released, providing support for heterogeneous big data sources and further demonstrating Oracle’s investment in big data standards support.

Easily Visualize Hadoop Data

While Hadoop gives businesses the benefit of being able to store huge quantities of data cheaply, extracting value from that data has been the realm of data scientists—a rare and very in-demand breed who traditionally have had to rely upon complex tools to prepare and analyze data.

But Oracle Big Data Discovery changes that, providing a visual user interface that makes it easy to find, explore, transform, and analyze data in Hadoop and to share the results with the business. It requires no specialized skills, so organizations can tap their existing business analysts to mine value from their data and also enable data scientists to be far more productive.

Learn how Oracle Big Data Discovery quickly turns raw data into business insight.

Oracle Big Data Discovery can be deployed on Oracle Big Data Appliance, on Oracle Cloud, or on commodity hardware in an existing Hadoop cluster.

“With Oracle Big Data Discovery, an organization’s data scientists, business analysts, and subject matter experts don’t have to become developers in order to query data, and the easy-to-use interface helps users gain the insight they need faster—and communicate those insights with others more clearly,” says Jeff Pollock, Oracle vice president for product management.

Integrate Data in Real Time

Big data is all about speed. Businesses are under intense pressure to deliver services, information, and insight in real time—leveraging data stores that are unprecedented in size.

Such speed isn’t possible using batch technologies, which traditionally are used to deliver transactional data. The newly announced Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data, on the other hand, enables business users to access transactional data in real time without decreasing the performance of source systems.

“In a busy application like e-commerce, using a batch process to transfer transactional data to business users can slow the performance of that application or even take it offline,” Pollock explains. “Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data is designed to reduce latency and move that critical data much faster.”

Announcing Oracle Data Integrator for Big Data.

In addition, proprietary data integration solutions that prepare and transform data for use in the business often require additional coding or hardware. But enhancements to Oracle Data Integrator increase operational control of data in the Hadoop environment without proprietary code or additional servers, and regardless of which Hadoop programming language is used. The new release of Oracle Data Integrator includes native support for Apache Spark on Python, Apache Pig, and orchestration through Apache Oozie, which frees customers from having to decide what technology to adopt as a standard for their big data projects.

“The big data space is changing very fast right now; we don’t know what the fashionable big data language will be in a year,” says Pollock. “The new version of Oracle Data Integrator provides a way to implement data transfer in a logical way regardless of the language used—which means organizations won’t have to worry about finding programmers skilled in the latest language.”

Data Liquidity Is Key

“Oracle’s vision for enterprise big data is computation in every action,” Sonderegger says. “To make that possible, Hadoop, NoSQL, and relational technologies must work together, deployed from a mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure.”

The challenge for businesses is that the ocean of data continues to grow, and the time it takes to sift through that data and find meaning—and the cost of doing so—continues to increase.

“Oracle’s goal is to help companies get the data they want in the shape they need in order to make decisions—faster, with lower cost, and less risk,” Sonderegger says. “These new products and enhancements, in addition to Oracle’s products for big data management, integration, and analytics and a range of integrated applications, are designed to help accomplish that goal.”