Oracle Corp. today debuted an infrastructure platform for powering on-premises cloud environments, new public cloud services and several major updates to its database portfolio. 

The company made the announcements at its annual Oracle CloudWorld event running this week in Las Vegas.

Oracle Alloy

The first new addition to Oracle’s product portfolio is an infrastructure offering called Oracle Alloy. Alloy is described as a hardware and software platform that makes it possible to create a version of Oracle’s public cloud platform in on-premises data centers. Additionally, an organization can make its Alloy-powered infrastructure available to its customers similarly to a cloud provider. 

“Giving our partners and customers more choice has long been a primary focus for OCI,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Today, we’re going one step further by providing our partners with the option to become cloud providers so that they can build new services faster and address specific market and regulatory requirements.”

According to Oracle, a company can sell Alloy-powered cloud services under its brand and set its own pricing. Organizations may also customize other aspects of their Alloy-powered cloud offerings, such as how technical support is delivered to clients. An embedded version of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud ERP software can be used to manage the administrative and business tasks involved in providing cloud services.

Alloy includes tools that enable companies to adapt their deployments of the platform to their requirements. A company could, for example, run custom software-as-a-service applications on its Alloy-powered infrastructure and sell them to customers. It’s also possible to add external hardware such as mainframes to an Alloy deployment.

“As cloud providers, our partners have more control over the customer experience for their targeted customer or industry, including where the workloads reside and how their cloud is operated,” Magouyrk said.

Public cloud enhancements

Oracle detailed Alloy alongside several additions to its public cloud. A new offering called Oracle Database Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service will make it easier to recover a cloud-based database environment after an outage. It’s joined by the Oracle Full Stack Disaster Recovery Service, which is designed for addressing outages that affect not only databases but also the other components of a company’s cloud deployment.

Oracle is in conjunction introducing new tools for developers. OCI Queue is a new service in the company’s cloud platform that makes it easier to transfer data between applications packaged into software containers. Developers are also receiving access to Container Instances, a tool that Oracle says will provide the ability to launch new cloud-based containers in as little as a few seconds.

MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse

Alloy and Oracle’s new developer tools debuted alongside MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse, a cloud-based data lakehouse designed to support enterprise analytics projects. Oracle claims that the offering can provide significantly faster performance than competing products.

A data lakehouse is a software platform that combines the features of a data lake and a data warehouse. It enables organizations to analyze structured and unstructured information in a single environment. A data lakehouse also provides certain other capabilities, including features that are intended to ensure data analyses are carried out without errors. 

The newly introduced MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse is part of Oracle’s existing MySQL HeatWave service. The service is a cloud-based version of MySQL, a widely used open-source relational database. MySQL HeatWave includes a set of features designed to speed up queries and ease common data management tasks. 

Using the newly added MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse, customers can run queries on both structured and unstructured data. Oracle says that the software makes it possible to query up to 400 terabytes of data. Meanwhile, built-in automation tools promise to speed up several of the manual tasks historically involved in processing large amounts of information. 

According to Oracle, MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse can run queries up to 17 times faster than Snowflake Inc.’s namesake cloud-based data platform. The company is also promising 6 times better performance than Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Amazon Redshift data warehouse. According to Oracle, the task of loading data into MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse for processing can be done faster as well than with competing platforms. 

“MySQL HeatWave is the result of years of research and advanced development, which we are turning into breakthrough innovations to address a bigger set of challenges for all MySQL customers,” said Oracle Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven. “MySQL HeatWave now provides one integrated service on multiple clouds for transaction processing, analytics across data warehouses and data lakes, and machine learning without ETL.”

Oracle Database

In conjunction with the update to MySQL HeatWave, Oracle today introduced the latest version of its namesake database. Oracle Database 23c introduces several new features designed to help companies process their information more efficiently.

One of the flagship upgrades in the release is a capability called JSON Relational Duality. Many applications store their information in the JSON data format, which is popular among developers because it’s relatively easy to use. The new JSON Relational Duality will make it simpler to build such applications on Oracle Database. 

“The breadth and depth of data technologies used by modern applications can make developing and running apps increasingly complex,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president of mission-critical database technologies at Oracle. “Oracle Database 23c ‘App Simple’ introduces game changing new technologies that make it dramatically easier to develop and run these modern apps.”

Alongside JSON Relational Duality, Oracle Database 23c includes machine learning features that will help increase the speed at which queries are completed. A new built-in firewall automatically blocks malicious SQL queries sent to the database. Oracle has also added several other enhancements that focus on improving performance and reducing manual work for developers. 

Photo: Oracle