Oracle makes 'big data' push even bigger

Oracle is doubling down on "big data" with a number of new products and enhancements to existing ones, in hopes that customers looking to analyze massive amounts of information for business insights will in turn invest further in Oracle.

For one thing, Oracle's Big Data Appliance (shown above) now features "enterprise-class" security for Hadoop, the open-source data processing framework, Oracle announced Monday during the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Specifically, Big Data Appliance has been integrated with Kerberos and LDAP authentication, as well as Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall, according to the announcement. The software add-ons can peer into Hadoop audit trails, looking for suspicious activities and alerting administrators, as well as generate reports when desired.

Oracle has also released additional features for Hadoop, including a new connector that "enables standard XQuery operations to process and transform XML documents, executing in parallel across the Hadoop cluster," according to Monday's announcement.

In addition, Big Data Appliance now features Perfect Balance, which modulates workloads for faster performance in MapReduce jobs, Oracle said.

Oracle's big data product arsenal also includes its flagship database, for which a new in-memory option was announced Sunday.

While definitions vary, in general big data refers to the massive amounts of information being created by social media, sensors, websites and other sources. Observers also often invoke the "three Vs" of big data, namely the variety, velocity and volume of information flows.

Some 64 percent of organizations surveyed in a new Gartner study said they are investing now or plan to invest in big data technology, up from 58 percent in 2012.

Still, it appears that most of the activity around big data remains in the heavy hype from vendors selling products aimed at it. Less than 8 percent of respondents to Gartner's survey have in fact deployed their big data platforms.

That said, "there is real substance behind the hype," Gartner research director Lisa Kart said in a statement. "Our survey underlines the fact that organizations across industries and geographies see 'opportunity' and real business value rather than the 'smoke and mirrors' with which hypes usually come."

Big data analytics are "hugely important" to Thomson Reuters, said Mark Bluhm, senior vice president of global data center, during an onstage interview at OpenWorld Monday with Oracle Co-President Mark Hurd.

Thomson Reuters' customers aren't looking for search engines, he said: "It's, give us the research so we can make a decision."

Bluhm gave the example of a South Pacific storm and its potential effect on oil prices. If customers can know quickly how the storm will delay tankers, "suddenly instead of becoming victims, they become opportunists," he said.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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Oracle pushes into database-as-a-service

Oracle has hyped its new 12c database as faster and more powerful than ones that have come before, and now it’s highlighting the release’s ability to easily serve up multiple databases of varying size and scope according to a particular user’s needs.

Many Oracle customers are excited about 12c, and for a particular reason, said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies, during a keynote Monday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

“Customers are telling us they want to go to database-as-a-service, on-premise,” he said.

Version 12c, which became generally available in June, includes an already well-publicized feature called “pluggable” databases, where many discrete databases sit inside a single container database, an approach that Oracle says can radically reduce operational overhead.

Mendelsohn described a scenario in which an IT department could offer end users a menu of database options.

A bronze tier would be for simple backups of less important databases, while a silver level would add in Oracle’s Data Guard for additional security. A top-level gold tier could include Real Application Clusters along with Data Guard. Users would also choose from standard database sizes from the menu.

Mendelsohn and another Oracle employee demonstrated a new self-service provisioning tool that is being released along with 12c.

“In a couple seconds you’re up and running,” Mendelsohn said, as the demo showed the selection of a database was possible with a few clicks. “Pretty amazing, right?”

Meanwhile, databases could also be easily “unplugged” from various tiers and moved to others as priorities change, Mendelsohn added.

The pluggable database architecture also offers a new take on multitenancy, a feature used in SaaS (software-as-a-service). Rather than have all customers share a single application instance, they would each get a pluggable database, Mendelsohn said.

“This huge barrier of entry for people to become SaaS providers is all gone,” he added.

That said, Oracle’s technology stack has already served as a foundation for many SaaS vendors, and presumably Oracle will look to move them all onto the latest releases, including Database 12c.

One such vendor is Salesforce.com, which recently announced it would commit long term to Oracle technologies. The pact also publicly buried the hatchet between Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

Elsewhere in his keynote, Mendelsohn provided further details on the Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance, which was unveiled briefly by Ellison on Sunday.

The appliance, which is due out “sometime next year,” can scale out to petabytes of data, he said. It differs from and improves on past backup products, allowing users to restore a system back to any point in time they choose.

Oracle also announced a cloud-based backup service as well as the ability to replicate their Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance to Oracle’s cloud.

Mendelsohn didn’t touch upon Oracle’s public cloud database-as-a-service, which was announced in 2011. Ellison is expected to discuss that offering as well as other Oracle public cloud services during a Tuesday keynote at OpenWorld.

Nor did Mendelsohn speak at length about an upcoming in-memory option for the Oracle database, which Ellison also announced Sunday.

That option is now in “pre-beta stage” in Mendelsohn’s development group, and will be coming out next year, he said.

Oracle is hoping the in-memory option will help it fend off interest in competing in-memory databases, such as SAP’s HANA. SAP is hoping that its customers who now use Oracle to run SAP applications will switch to HANA.

Oracle’s database architecture is “bloated” compared to HANA and the in-memory option could mean more work for database administrators, SAP said in an emailed statement.

In addition, “while Oracle was working on 12c, SAP HANA matured from a database to a platform to perform application functions close to the database—e.g. predictive libraries, business functions, graph processing, geo spatial processing, text processing engines and app server capabilities in memory,” SAP said. “We are ready for the next generation apps that will need these application management capabilities natively in database. We believe that they are really behind on this.”

While Mendelsohn spoke repeatedly about strong early interest in 12c, typically most Oracle database customers wait quite some time to upgrade, in the interest of letting others work out any remaining bugs.

There are other considerations as well, said John Matelski, CIO of DeKalb County, Georgia, in an interview.

“With a lot of the security enhancements and multitenancy, there’s a lot of excitement about [12c],” said Matelski, who is also vice president of the Independent Oracle Users Group. “But organizationally you can’t just make a leap. We have a good number of folks that have started the planning phases, but even the planning phase takes six to nine months.”

Other factors are somewhat out of Oracle’s hands, namely how long it takes for third-party application vendors to certify their products for a new release, Matelski added. Until that happens, “we know we’ll get support from Oracle but you don’t know you’re going to get the support from other vendors,” he said.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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Oracle software will run faster with new Sparc M6 chip

Oracle's database and high-performance workloads will run faster with the company's latest Sparc M6 chip, which has been tuned specially for the company's applications.

The latest Sparc processor has 12 processor cores, effectively doubling the number of cores than its predecessor, M5, which shipped earlier this year. Each M6 core will be able to run 8 threads simultaneously, giving the chip the ability to run 96 threads simultaneously, said Ali Vahidsafa , senior hardware engineer at Oracle, during a presentation about M6 at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California.

[ Also on InfoWorld: MIT develops 110-core processor for more power-efficient computing. | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter. ]

Sparc has been around for more than two decades, and the goal with M6 is to push the processor deeper into high-performance and highly parallel systems, Vahidsafa said, adding that the new chip will help expand Oracle's portfolio of high-end servers.

"What runs on these servers is consolidation of virtual workloads, and single-image databases, in particular in-memory databases and application. Both of those can benefit from higher thread count and higher memory footprint," Vahidsafa said.

It is also imperative that the benefits of the new chip be accessible to current workloads and software, Vahidsafa said.

Multithreaded applications will benefit most from the new chip, but single-threaded applications will have access to the specific "Critical Thread" queue thanks to a feature in OS scheduling, which could speed up workloads.

Some other chip features have not changed from the M5, which was the first high-end enterprise Sparc chip variant with a higher cache-to-core ratio. The M6 chip will have 48MB of L3 cache, and support 1TB of memory per socket. Oracle did not reveal the clock speed of the chip.

The chip has been tuned for in-memory databases and applications with four DDR3 schedulers to better organize traffic and visibility of tasks, Vahidsafa said. The memory subsystem has been organized for system designers to balance performance, power and serviceability.

The processors also can be linked to create two-way, four-way or eight-way servers. Using special boxes called Bixby, the chip will also allow for creation of 32-way, 48-way or even 96-way servers, with memory and other resources being shared. The M6 has features to balance out performance in servers to reduce latency and to ensure transactions are quickly processed. The coherency features have been built from the ground up for larger systems, and can be applied to smaller server pools, Vahidsafa said.

The chip also has new RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) to track down errors in the system, which ensures high server uptime. In conjunction with the Solaris OS, a three-step process identifies errant threads, cores or cache, which are isolated, reported and then cleaned up. It also has ECC memory.

Vahidsafa declined to comment on when the chip would become available in servers.

Another Sparc chip got attention at Hot Chips, with Fujitsu sharing details about its latest mainframe chip called Sparc X+. The 16-core chip runs at 3.5GHz and higher, and can be used in mainframes with up to 64 sockets. Each core will support two simultaneous threads, with the ability for a mainframe to run 2,048 threads simultaneously. On-chip software helps accelerate database applications, said Toshio Yoshida , director in the processor development division at Fujitsu.

Fujitsu and Oracle collaborate on chip development. Oracle also resells Fujitsu servers.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com.

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Oracle software will run faster with new SPARC M6 chip

Oracle's database and high-performance workloads will run faster with the company's latest SPARC M6 chip, which has been tuned specially for the company's applications.

The latest SPARC processor has 12 processor cores, effectively doubling the number of cores than its predecessor, M5, which shipped earlier this year. Each M6 core will be able to run 8 threads simultaneously, giving the chip the ability to run 96 threads simultaneously, said Ali Vahidsafa , senior hardware engineer at Oracle, during a presentation about M6 at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California.

SPARC has been around for more than two decades, and the goal with M6 is to push the processor deeper into high-performance and highly parallel systems, Vahidsafa said, adding that the new chip will help expand Oracle's portfolio of high-end servers.

"What runs on these servers is consolidation of virtual workloads, and single-image databases, in particular in-memory databases and application. Both of those can benefit from higher thread count and higher memory footprint," Vahidsafa said.

It is also imperative that the benefits of the new chip be accessible to current workloads and software, Vahidsafa said.

Multithreaded applications will benefit most from the new chip, but single-threaded applications will have access to the specific "Critical Thread" queue thanks to a feature in OS scheduling, which could speed up workloads.

Some other chip features have not changed from the M5, which was the first high-end enterprise SPARC chip variant with a higher cache-to-core ratio. The M6 chip will have 48MB of L3 cache, and support 1TB of memory per socket. Oracle did not reveal the clock speed of the chip.

The chip has been tuned for in-memory databases and applications with four DDR3 schedulers to better organize traffic and visibility of tasks, Vahidsafa said. The memory subsystem has been organized for system designers to balance performance, power and serviceability.

The processors also can be linked to create two-way, four-way or eight-way servers. Using special boxes called Bixby, the chip will also allow for creation of 32-way, 48-way or even 96-way servers, with memory and other resources being shared. The M6 has features to balance out performance in servers to reduce latency and to ensure transactions are quickly processed. The coherency features have been built from the ground up for larger systems, and can be applied to smaller server pools, Vahidsafa said.

The chip also has new RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) to track down errors in the system, which ensures high server uptime. In conjunction with the Solaris OS, a three-step process identifies errant threads, cores or cache, which are isolated, reported and then cleaned up. It also has ECC memory.

Vahidsafa declined to comment on when the chip would become available in servers.

Another SPARC chip got attention at Hot Chips, with Fujitsu sharing details about its latest mainframe chip called SPARC X+. The 16-core chip runs at 3.5GHz and higher, and can be used in mainframes with up to 64 sockets. Each core will support two simultaneous threads, with the ability for a mainframe to run 2,048 threads simultaneously. On-chip software helps accelerate database applications, said Toshio Yoshida , director in the processor development division at Fujitsu.

Fujitsu and Oracle collaborate on chip development. Oracle also resells Fujitsu servers.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com

Agam Shah is a reporter for the IDG News Service in New York. He covers hardware including PCs, servers, tablets, chips, semiconductors, consumer electronics and peripherals.
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SAP takes fight to Salesforce.com, Oracle with social intelligence app

Many companies have begun using specialized software to analyze what people are saying about their products and services on social media, and now SAP says it can help them match up individuals’ social profiles with customer history data from CRM (customer relationship management) systems.

Dubbed Social Contact Intelligence, the application can help sales and marketing staff find better leads for sales as well as gain more knowledge about their actual customers’ likes and dislikes, according to SAP.

Social Contact Intelligence is built on top of and dependent on HANA, SAP’s in-memory database platform. It’s part of a broader suite, Customer Engagement Intelligence, that is now in “ramp-up,” SAP’s term for an initial release with a small set of customers. Currently it’s only offered on-premises, but SAP is considering cloud-based deployments for the future, according to a spokeswoman.

Core CRM software is “such a commodity it’s almost relegated to a system of record,” said Jamie Anderson, vice president of customer solution marketing. Thanks to the rise of social media and resulting changes to the way customers interact with companies and make buying decisions, “we’ve realized the CRM market is evolving faster than CRM products on their own.”

SAP had already been reselling software from Netbase for social media analytics, but now the Contact Intelligence product brings internal customer data to the equation, he said.

The three other elements of SAP’s Customer Intelligence Engagement suite include Audience Discovery and Targeting, for running segmented marketing campaigns; Customer Value Intelligence, which gives recommendations on ways to cross and up-sell products to clients; and Account Intelligence, a mobile application for sales representatives.

Tuesday’s announcement comes after SAP’s unveiling in November of yet another social CRM-themed product set called 360 Customer, which ties together HANA, CRM, social analytics from Netbase and the Jam social network.

Oracle, Salesforce.com and other vendors are also moving quickly to build out social software portfolios, seeing the market as a major opportunity to sell existing customers more software when they have little interest or need to expand their core CRM system.

The competitive climate can put customers at a disadvantage, according to a recent Forrester Research report.

“Decoding and navigating the crowded social technology vendor landscape isn’t easy,” wrote analysts Nate Elliott and Zach Hofer-Shall. “Most vendors offer a unique range of social technologies, but no single vendor covers the entire value chain. Meanwhile, buzzword-packed marketing materials make it difficult to differentiate the players and find the right fit.”

The level of emphasis and investment that companies should place on social software investments depends on their size, according to another recent Forrester report.

Immature companies should start small, analysts Allison Smith and Carlton Doty wrote: “Track down a high-impact use case, find a listening platform partner who can guide you, and experiment. This is an iterative, test-and-learn kind of process.”

Companies in a medium stage of growth should not “settle for ‘good enough’” from a vendor and must avoid signing more than a one-year deal, they added. “With limited exceptions, social listening platforms are easy to replace—and if yours is holding you back, get rid of it.”

When no single best platform is targeted after soliciting bids from vendors, “many companies opt to create a Frankenstein’s monster combination of multiple platforms,” they wrote. “This approach is cumbersome and pricey, but a necessary evil unless such firms are willing to simplify some business requirements.”

Meanwhile, mature companies should “prepare to listen on a larger scale,” according to Smith and Doty. “Developing into a fully integrated social intelligence practice will give you the skills to take your listening to the next level—outside of social,” they wrote. “Your customers engage with you across channels and in unstructured, nonlinear ways. They also provide feedback in traditional channels like surveys, in the call center, and in web-based self-service functions.”

Updated at 5:30 p.m. PT to correct erroneous details on product availability.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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Oracle unveils HTML5-based mobile BI app designer

Oracle is latching onto the self-service BI (business intelligence) trend with a new tool for creating HTML5-based mobile applications.

BI Mobile App Designer, which was announced Monday, runs in a browser and has a drag-and-drop design format. Users can mash together graphs, tables and other types of data “to create mobile analytical apps tailor-made to their lines of business,” Oracle said.

The experience is “as easy as working with common office productivity tools,” Oracle claimed.

Oracle’s use of HTML5 means the applications can run across iOS, Android and Windows Mobile devices. Users are able to share mobile applications through a catalog called App Library, according to the announcement.

BI Mobile App Designer is part of Oracle’s Business Intelligence Foundation Suite, which lists for $300,000 per processor license, and uses the same security model. It’s also included with the BI Mobile option for Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, according to a statement.

Oracle is positioning BI Mobile App Designer as a self-service product that end-users can work with without the ongoing help of IT. But there are a number of caveats to consider, said Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson.

“The self-service term has many interpretations, it’s not just yes or no,” Evelson said via email Monday. “There are many shades of gray.”

For one thing, “‘intuitive and ‘user friendly’ are subjective terms,” Evelson wrote in a Forrester Report on self-service BI released last year: “A point-and-click and drag-and-drop graphical user interface (GUI) may be a nirvana of intuitiveness to an information management pro who started his computer career working with punch cards or green-screen terminals, but to a younger generation of knowledge workers brought up on search GUI from Google and social media GUI from Facebook, a point-and-click GUI may not be as obvious or natural.”

Forrester breaks out more than 20 criteria for self-service BI, such as whether the tool includes automatic data modeling, collaboration capabilities and data virtualization for tying together multiple data sources, rather than forcing users to wait until IT creates a new data mart within a central data warehouse.

Overall, in most self-service BI cases, IT still has to set up the infrastructure to source and extract data, as well as integrate and model the information before users can start working with a self-service tool, Evelson said.

However, data-exploration and discovery tools are separate from this, in that they don’t need to work with clean, integrated and modeled data, Evelson added.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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Trade group reports controversial Oracle advertisements to FTC

An advertising industry oversight group has reported Oracle to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission after the vendor allegedly failed to comply with previous rulings.

The National Advertising Division, which is controlled by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, investigated three Oracle advertising campaigns last year after complaints from IBM. Each of the campaigns contained “an overbroad and unsupported comparison between one Oracle product and one IBM product,” the group said in a statement late Thursday.

In July 2012, Oracle agreed to pull advertisements claiming that its Exadata database machine was vastly more powerful than IBM’s Power Systems hardware, but said at the time it believed the NAD’s ruling was too broad.

“Now, IBM has brought NAD’s attention to a fourth Oracle advertising campaign, featuring the claim that Oracle’s Sparc T5 has ‘2.6x Better Performance’ as compared to IBM’s Power7+ AIX server,” the NAD said. “The advertising in question features the same stark, overbroad IBM-versus-Oracle comparison that NAD recommended against in the three previous cases.”

Oracle has repeatedly failed to “make any (much less a good faith) effort to bring its advertising into compliance,” which has required referring the matter to the FTC, according to NAD’s statement.

An Oracle spokesman said via email Friday that the company disagrees with the NADs’ decision, and “believes the ad is fair and accurate.”

“The ad provides a clear and objective comparison between an IBM Power7+ AIX system and an Oracle Sparc T5 system using industry standard benchmark results that legitimately show 2.6x better performance by the Oracle system,” said spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger. “NAD has failed to take into account the sophistication of the ad’s target audience, namely businesses that purchase enterprise hardware systems.”

Meanwhile, IBM is “gratified” by the NAD’s decision, spokesman Jeffrey Cross said in a statement.

The Sparc T5 advertisement “suffers from the same problems as its former campaigns: A disconnect between the message conveyed by the advertising and the testing offered in its support,” he added.

There’s little love lost between Oracle and IBM, who are fierce competitors in the high-end server market.

Oracle’s hardware revenue has consistently fallen since it got into the business with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but company officials maintain they are focused on selling higher-margin products like Exadata, which customers must also load up with lucrative software licenses.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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