Oracle has just rolled out a handy new tool to help companies explore the oceans of data being consumed by technologies like Hadoop. Called the Oracle Big Data Spatial and Graph, the tool brings several new analytic capabilities to Hadoop and NoSQL.

Oracle’s database already has its own spatial and graph tools, reports the IDG News service. However these tools are limited to uncovering relationships and carrying out analysis of location-based data sets. Now, with Big Data Spatial and Graph, Oracle is hoping to tackle more diverse data sets and reduce the need for data movement. The new tool is therefore capable of processing data natively on Hadoop and in tandem with MapReduce and in-memory structures.

The tool comes with two main components, including a distributed property graph that offers over 35 high-performance, parallel, in-memory analytic functions. It also offers a number of spatial analysis functions that can evaluate data sets based on how closer or far from something they are, whether that data lies within a particular boundary or region, and process or visualize geospatial data and imagery.

Using these features, analysts should be able to discover new relationships and connections among assets, organizations and customers. They can also perform analysis on group results based on spatial relationships, for example by filtering out customer data based on how far apart those customers live.

Oracle says its Big Data Spatial and Graph can be deployed on the Oracle Big Data Appliance, in addition to Hadoop and various NoSQL databases.

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