Oracle’s announcement of its In-Memory offering was welcomed by many who were impressed by its amazing speed. CEO Larry Ellison described the In-Memory Database processing as having “ungodly speed”, but it is also in a market that is “ripe for the picking” by open source competitors. Actually, the general reaction to Oracle’s announcement seems to be that many customers would prefer less-expensive and more customer-driven (rather than technology driven) solutions.

The benefit of an in-memory database is that admins can move application sets or “hot data’ to the system memory, accelerating applications. They can use tiered data as a platform for accelerating read-only data or store read-only and write data in persistent memory. Oracle’s offering can run entirely in the system memory (RAM), while applications access the technology using standard SQL interfaces.

The biggest component when running Oracle is the Oracle license, according to Violin Memory VP of Production Narayan Venkat. Therefore, customers can save money by using flash as a tier to optimize the number of cores, eliminating processes waiting for I/O and requiring fewer cycles.

See Venkat’s entire commentary below, filmed during a live broadcast at the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld just last week.

What Frenimies Say

MemSQL argues that Oracle focuses too much on columnar technology, but is essentially hoping customers will ignore the “more important trend”, which is the ability to run on commodity hardware. In-memory stores remove I/O costs, which enables better performance on commodity servers where DRAM is just as fast. According to a MemSQL blog post, the world is moving away from old appliances like those of Oracle’s and moving toward elastic computing. The new world is built on distributed systems.

Aerospike CTO Brian Bullowski suggests that Oracle’s move into the market of in-memory is an indication that the market has matured, since Oracle is not known for taking risks. This also means that Oracle is behind the competition since it is a latecomer.

Clustrix had more direct criticism of Oracle’s offering, calling it an old vertical build-up stack that is expensive, inflexible, and filled with proprietary lock-in. Meanwhile the rest of the world is transitioning from scale-up to scale-out. Customers want transactional data analyzed in real time, something Clustrix already offers.

IBM, while not directly commenting on Oracle, also offers real-time analysis with its PureData and DB2 PureScale clustered systems. Like Clustrix it also provides data protection from power outage.

.

Speed and Savings

Customers clearly want speed when it comes to this technology space, but they also expect to see big savings. That is the big incentive for flash memory in general. Oracle delivers speed effectively, as even its competition attests. Nevertheless, Oracle’s competition is fierce, and as one analyst suggested, a viable open source solution may not be far away.