Talking about a U-turn…
Oracle must have thought: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
A few quotes from the article on Wired.com that I linked below:
Just four months ago, Oracle released a very official-looking corporate white paper intent on “debunking the hype” surrounding the NoSQL movement — a widespread effort to build a new breed of database that can juggle vast amounts of “unstructured” information in ways a traditional Oracle database can’t.
“The NoSQL databases are beginning to feel like an ice cream store that entices you with a new flavor of the month,” the white paper read. “[But] you shouldn’t get too attached to any of the flavors because it may not be around for too long.”…
Last week, a few words sprinkled onto the OpenWorld website indicated that such a database was on the way, and with his Monday morning keynote, Oracle executive vice president of product development Thomas Kurian officially acknowledged the unkept secret, announcing that the Oracle NoSQL Database will be included with a new hardware system known as the Oracle Big Data Appliance. Big Data is the moniker du jour for the epic amounts of unstructured web data facing many of today’s businesses, and with the new appliance, Oracle is embracing not only NoSQL, but Hadoop, the other open source movement so often associated with the term.