At Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, CEO Larry Ellison declared war on SAP HANA with the new In-Memory Option for his company’s flagship database software. The feature delivers “ungodly” performance with up to 100 times faster queries, but in true Oracle spirit, the extra horsepower comes with a price tag to match.

The M6-32 Big Memory Machine, a pre-integrated “engineered system” designed to run the latest Oracle Database 12c release, sets customers back by approximately $100,000 per terabyte. The appliance is supposedly cheaper than traditional alternatives, but it’s not nearly as cost efficient as the commodity hardware used to power large-scale cloud and analytics environments.

Narayan Venkat , the vice president of production for SSD maker Violin Memory, dropped by theCUBE after Ellison’s keynote to discuss how Oracle customers can drive efficiencies without abandoning their existing infrastructure investments. He detailed that flash enables enterprises to “achieve tremendous amount of application acceleration and, as a result, business acceleration too.”

For Oracle deployments users, this business acceleration translates into increased application responsiveness and, according to Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer, tremendous cost savings.

“The largest single component of any system running Oracle is the Oracle license itself,” he explained. “If you can optimize on the numbers of cores that you need, using flash as a Tier, then the net effect of that is that a whole lot of processes that you would do waiting for I/O goes away, and you require far fewer cycles – in the order of 40-50 percent less – needing less Oracle licenses to do your work. This allows for improvement in that environment.”

Flash and the rapid commoditization of enterprise hardware are chipping away at Oracle’s dominant marketplace, creating an opening for emerging players such as Aerospike. The startup offers a flash-optimized in-memory database that is both faster and more cost-efficient than relational alternatives, founder Brian Bulkowski noted in an interview.

Commenting on the launch of In-Memory Option, Bulkowski told us that “the move validates the market for us. We’ve been beating Oracle NoSQL in the field with customers for nearly a year and a half now. That’s based on price, performance, not wanting to deal with Oracle’s sales people, and based on the uptime and reliability we have.”

Check out the video below to hear the full interview with Bulkowski.