SAP announced it has integrated its in-memory High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) with IBM’s DB2 database, which gives the two companies’ rivalry against Oracle and its Exadata platform a serious boost from the (near) real-time big data analytics view.  “The integration is enabled by SAP’s Sybase Replication Server, which SAP gained through the acquisition of that company last year. DB2 is now “HANA-ready and can efficiently replicate data into SAP HANA in near real time,” according to a statement.”

According to some figures provided by the German software maker, a HANA installation running on IBM 3850-series servers (with the system using a 32 core X5 server with 0.5TB of memory and a RAID 5 disk array) managed to deliver 10,000 queries of sales delivery tables per hour on n 1.3TB of data. The setup reportedly brought back results in a matter of seconds without using any assists, and with the real-time big data analytics becoming one of the biggest trends in the cloud, Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus also expects HANA will eventually be integrated with SAP’s Business Warehouse offering.

SAP and IBM have teamed up to get competitive with Oracle, but Teradata is trying to get competitive with IBM. Business Week reports the company has signed a deal to buy big data analytics software maker Aster Data for $263 million. Teradata will get $21 million in cash from Aster Data’s balance sheet, as well as a serious push towards its expansion in the data warehousing space.  Aster represents the second company Teradata has bought in the last 2 months, coming shortly after the $525 million all-cash Aprimo deal.

As the race between IBM and its competition rages on, the company is pushing the analytics front even further with its newly announced big data ‘bootcamps’ – 1,200 free training courses in more than 150 cities worldwide encompassing it data, analytics, data management and relevant open-source technologies including Hadoop. SAP has also been active recently, trying to do some damage control and reduce the 1.3 billion it was sentenced to pay to Oracle on the grounds of copyright infringement.