Oracle: SQL Best For Big Data Analysis

10 Big Data Online Courses

(Click image for larger view and slideshow.)

The relational database is maligned and misrepresented by big-data zealots. That's the perspective Oracle EVP and Database Group leader Andy Mendelsohn shared at this week's Oracle OpenWorld event.

"A lot of people out there say, 'Relational databases are old, legacy products from 40 years ago,' and now you want something new, like NoSQL or NewSQL," Mendelsohn began in a broad-ranging, hour-long keynote. "You can rest assured that relational databases will keep evolving as needs and technologies evolve."

As the market-share leader in relational databases, Oracle is invariably cited by big-data vendors of every description as the incumbent competition. Indeed, many of those upstarts are thriving on IT budget dollars that might have otherwise gone to Oracle. Mendelsohn's message was that investments in Oracle will advance big data (and cloud) aspirations.

[Want more on Oracle Big Data Discovery? Read Oracle Unveils Hadoop Data Exploration Tool.]

"One of the big myths out there is you need NoSQL databases or Hadoop because relational databases can't deal with unstructured data," he said. "As you all know as Oracle customers, we added support for unstructured data 20 years ago. In fact, we've extended SQL so you can do smart things with unstructured data."

If you have geospatial coordinates, for example, you can ask the database to show you all the customers within a 10-mile radius of your store. "You can't do that with NoSQL databases," Mendelsohn said, allowing, "Maybe you can do that with a lot of work in some of the other system."

Oracle EVP Mendelsohn defends relational databases at Oracle OpenWorld.

Here's where NoSQL vendors Basho and DataStax would point out that the open-source databases that they support (Riak and Cassandra, respectively) are integrated with the Solr search engine, which supports geospatial searches. A separate query approach, yes, but it doesn't sound like a lot of work.

Mendelsohn also noted that Oracle has extended its flavor of SQL to handle JSON (Java Script Object Notation), a fast-growing data type often used by web and mobile applications. And with JSON support recently added to Oracle Database 12c in a July update, you can now add JSON columns to the relational database and use SQL extensions to pluck out attributes or fields from JSON documents.

Here's where a NoSQL vendor like MongoDB might point out that the JSON support that Oracle, IBM (with DB2), and other relational database vendors have introduced doesn't perform in quite the same way as a NoSQL database.

"You end up with compromises with most of these products, like you can't do joins or you can't use all of the indexes that they support, or you can't access

Next Page

1 of 2