Hurd: SAP HANA isn't 'even comparable' to Oracle's in-memory technology

While SAP has made no secret of its desire to lure customers running Oracle databases over to its own HANA in-memory platform, any doubt that Oracle would fight back has been erased.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled an upcoming in-memory option for Oracle's recently released 12c database on Sunday, a bit more than two years after HANA went into general availability. And on Monday, co-President Mark Hurd said emphatically that Oracle customers would be best served by staying put.

"I don't like it when Exadata or the in-memory options get compared with SAP HANA," Hurd said at a press conference during the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday. "I don't think it's even comparable. HANA has to be programmed. What we told you about [Sunday] has nothing to do with that. You're not rewriting anything. I refute the thesis that they're comparable."

Putting it more bluntly, Hurd said, "Forget them."

Hurd repeated Ellison's assertion that Oracle customers can simply "flip a switch" once the in-memory option is available, and find their analytic and transactional applications running a whole lot faster.

The in-memory option is now in a "pre-beta" stage of development and will be released some time next year, said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies, during a keynote address earlier Monday.

Hurd was also quick to stress that Oracle has had in-memory capabilities such as the TimesTen caching software for a while now.

He declined to reveal pricing for the upcoming in-memory option, which is likely to be a key lever of opportunity for Oracle to retain database customers who are interested in SAP HANA.

While the in-memory option obviously won't be free of charge, Oracle could apply its traditionally steep discounts off list price and make a compelling case for customers to stick with its database platform rather than undergo a potentially more expensive and risky move to HANA. In turn, Oracle's pricing for the in-memory option could force SAP itself to trim HANA's cost.

Also, while the in-memory option isn't available just yet, using history as a guide, most Oracle database customers running version 11g won't be upgrading to 12c any time soon, preferring to let others take the risk of working out any remaining kinks. That means Oracle has plenty of time to make its case to existing customers.

Overall, the competitive fires between Oracle and SAP seem freshly stoked, evidenced by the tone of a response to Hurd's remarks from Vishal Sikka, who heads up all development at SAP.

"Well, they are right that it is not comparable to HANA," Sikka said in an emailed statement. "The in-memory option they announced completely misses the point because the column store is read-only, and therefore it is a redundant replica of data in the row store, which means redundant storage and at least 5x larger size."

"Plus, it hasn't actually been released yet, so please come back and talk to us when it is available," Sikka added.

There are now 2,000 HANA customers globally, with more than 300 of them interested in running SAP's Business Suite on the platform, according to an SAP spokesman. More than half of all HANA deployments are for non-SAP applications, SAP said.

An SAP spokesman could not say on Monday how many HANA projects today involve successful switches from Oracle.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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Google, Apple remove some restrictions on technology to Iran

Google has told Android developers that they can start offering free apps in Iran, while Apple has removed Iran from among the countries to which sales of its products are prohibited.

"Developers, starting today you can make your free apps available in Iran," Google said in a Google+ post on Monday.

The move appears to be linked to the U.S decision in May to lift sanctions on the export of a variety of consumer communications devices and software and services including mobile phones to Iran.

Exports of the devices to Iran had been blocked since the 1990s, but ahead of presidential elections in the June in the country, the U.S. decided that its new license would empower the Iranian people as the Iranian government intensifies its efforts to stifle their access to information.

The export of equipment to the Iranian government or to any individual or entity on a Specially Designated Nationals list, however, continued to be prohibited.( Technology covered under the new license were fee-based services, software and hardware required for personal communications over the Internet, including instant messaging, email, chat, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, web browsing and blogging.

The products, software and services now authorized for export to Iran also include mobile phones, personal digital assistants, satellite phones, computers, consumer network equipment, anti-tracking software, anti-censorship tools, virtual private networks, proxy tools and voice-over-IP and video chat tools.

Google said Monday that the new distribution option for developers is currently available only for free apps and not for priced apps or apps that use in-app billing. The new general license authorizes financial transactions related to the products it covers, said the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. The move by Google will give Iranians access to a number of important tools which activists use to protect themselves from surveillance, but developers have to still opt to make their apps available in Iran, it said.

Google's competitor Apple has also apparently removed Iran from its list of prohibited destinations for its products like the iPhone, iPad and Mac and associated software, citing the new general license in May. The list now includes Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Sudan. On an Apple support community, a user wanted to know how to contact Apple to set up a store in the country.

Both companies did not immediately comment.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service.
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W3C's Web Storage technology goes live

The World Wide Web Consortium has finalized its specification for Web Storage, a technology that would give Web applications more flexibility in storing data on user machines.

Now that Web Storage is an official specification, browser makers and Web application developers can deploy the technology without worrying about changes to the API (application programming interface), or about being liable for potential patent infringement.

The W3C’s Web Applications (WebApps) Working Group shepherded the W3C approval of the standard, after it was first developed by the Google engineer Ian Hickson and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG).

Web Storage works a bit like HTTP session cookies, which can store user data on the user’s machine for a website for extended user sessions, such as those for online purchases.

Web Storage offers a number of advantages over cookies though. It provides programmers with a richer programmatic interface. It makes it easier for a browser to support multiple sessions at the same site simultaneously. It also offers the ability to store megabytes of information on the user’s computer, which could be handy for storing a user’s email box, or documents that the user authored.

“One of the nice properties of Web Storage is that is a relatively simple specification from a feature and API perspective,” wrote Arthur Barstow, co-chair of the WebApps Working Group, in an email interview.

For more complex offline storage needs, Barstow recommended the W3C’s Indexed Database API, now in development.

Unlike many Web standards, Web Storage attracted a lot of interest early on from browser makers. It is already supported in Internet Explorer (back to version 8), Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari.

With Web Storage, each site has its own storage area on the user’s machine. Material is stored as key/value pairs, where each key is a string. The data itself must be in the string format as well. Each type of browser sets its own limit of how much data could be stored on the user’s computer, ranging from 5MB to 25MB.

Web Storage also provides some functionality to aid in user privacy. It provides a way to delete data after a certain period of time and restricts access to the data to just the websites that created the storage area. Domain name spoofing can be prevented by the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.

The work is not yet finished. The group still has to reduce the high overhead of using the storage mutex (mutual exclusion) object, which was designed to avoid race conditions.

The group also has to address a number of outstanding security issues. For instance, different services all sharing a single domain name could snoop on each other’s stored data. Service providers could also share user data on a machine without the user’s knowledge, which could encourage surreptitious user tracking.

The W3C is a standards organization that publishes open standard protocols and guidelines to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. It is headed by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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