Oracle CEO Larry Ellison

Amid exploding demand for data integration software in the Hadoop community, Oracle Corp. is rolling out a new way for organizations to track their information as it progresses through the analytics lifecycle. The launch completes the database maker’s lineup of governance solutions into a full suite on par with competing offerings from the likes of Talend Inc. and Informatica Corp..

The aptly-named Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management 12c platform provides a workbench for aggregating and deciphering the constant stream of records coming off the solutions organizations use to store and process their fast-growing information troves. With the launch, Larry Ellison’s is acknowledging that the analytics toolchain extends beyond its portfolio.

Through the Oracle Data Integrator, the software provides support for a host of third party systems ranging from traditional business intelligence installations to Hadoop. It also works with semi-structured machine-to-machine communications formatted in JSON, the standard for data sharing among web services, which the firm only embraced last September with the release of the latest version of its namesake relational store.

Once everything has been properly ingested into the Enterprise Metadata Management environment, analysts can start digging into the logs to discover useful patterns about how information flows through their organizations. To make the process as straightforward as possible, Oracle says that the platform has a glossary that explains the nuances of analyzing different types of metadata in business-friendly terms. The software also includes collaboration capabilities that allow users to offload more complicated aspects of the task to savvier colleagues.

Oracle is touting Enterprise Metadata Management as a cleaner and generally more effective alternative to manually aggregating and integrating information from different sources, which becomes all but impractical past a certain point. The platform covers all the usual use cases, namely security monitoring, report sourcing and impact analysis.