During his OOW keynote last night, Larry Ellison invoked the iPhone to make fun of his own product naming prowess. In doing so he announced to the audience what I was thinking throughout his speech. Game Changer.
The in-memory switch with the expected analytical efficiencies with the simultaneous row and columnar data availability and the more surprising update efficiencies once indexing is redundant changes the rules. Of course we need to see field benchmarks and the economics of the new database world (impact on RAC and other elements), the companion M6 machine with 32TB of memory Larry announced etc.
But in the mean time expect plenty of mocking and sniping as did the iPhone (full disclosure – I criticized Apple’s mobile carrier choice and its miserable network during the launch).
A bit less impact on video, social, sensory and other growing unstructured data which may not always be accumulated in an Oracle database, but for most structured enterprise data this will have a significant impact. If you are trying to sell analytical tools to the finance, billing, order management, logistics, HR, asset management areas this will clearly affect you.
Hopefully we will not see the dismissive reaction from those vendors similar to that Microsoft, Nokia and Blackberry had to the iPhone.
Steve Jobs waited for the follow up product – the iPad - to announce the end of PCs. I expect Larry to similarly announce – the end of the relational age. Relational as we have known it for 4 decades.
