Oracle Corp. yesterday took the wraps off its new Data Integrator for Big Data, a solution that’s designed to help facilitate data integration and help deliver actionable insights to customers.

The news comes shortly after Oracle announced a new grand vision for enterprise Big Data, releasing a clutch of new tools aimed at enabling its relational database to work together with technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL.

Oracle’s gambit is that it’s necessary to have the right tools in place to move and prepare data if users are to successfully generate new insights. In other words, new data must be integrated securely with existing data, infrastructure, processes and applications. Oracle’s new Big Data Integrator does just that by allowing all data repositories to be treated as just another data source, like existing structured databases and data warehouses are. It makes it possible to pull data from multiple sources and formats, be it relational data in a Microsoft database or material residing in a Teradata warehouse, for example.

Oracle says the new Big Data integrator runs natively without the need for a separate server or proprietary code to be installed.

“This is a significant milestone for Big Data tools,” said Jeff Pollock, Vice President of Product Management at Oracle. “With this new product Oracle has made it possible for our customers to be Big Data ETL developers without having to learn Scala, Pig or Oozie code.”

Pollock added that Oracle is now the only vendor that’s able to automatically generate Hive, Pig and Spark transformations from a single mapping, which means customers no longer have to worry about learning how to code in multipe programming languages.

It’s an important step the company insists, because Big Data tools like Hadoop and Spark use languages like Java and Python, making them more suitable for programmers rather than database admins (DBAs). But the company argues that most enterprise data analysis is carried out by DBAs and ETL experts, using tools like SQL. Oracle’s Big Data integrator therefore makes any non-Hadoop developer “instantly productive” on Hadoop, added Pollock in an interview with PC World.

Pollock offered an example use case, saying that retailers might be able to use the new software to analyze customer purchase histories. Real-time data capture tools like Oracle GoldenGate 12c can feed data into a Hadoop cluster, where it’s instantly prepared for analysis by the data integrator.

Of course, Oracle isn’t the only legacy vendor trying to simplify Hadoop integration. Just last week, Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled a new software package that integrates its Vertica database with HP Autonomy’s IDOL platform, giving customers a faster way to analyze vast amounts of unstructured data.

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