Oracle is introducing version of 4.3 of its NoSQL Database, a key-value database that has evolved from the company’s acquisition of BerkeleyDB Java Edition, an embeddable database. The new release offers key enhancements for the open source community, as well as cloud, and Oracle Enterprise Database customers, said Ashok Joshi, senior director of NoSQL, Berkeley Database, and Database Mobile Server at Oracle.
Open Source Community – “Given the interest in NoSQL technologies we thought that the right thing to do would be to make NoSQL DB Community Edition widely available to a variety of users so that they could leverage the performance, scalability, and transactional semantics that we offer for a variety of open source applications, as well as other use cases," said Joshi. "Starting with version 4.3, the NoSQL DB Community Edition, is now licensed under Apache version 2.0. It is a client-server solution so the client drivers have always been under Apache 2.0 but the server is now under Apache also.”
Cloud – Oracle has prepared how-to guides and scripts so that users can more easily provision infrastructure as a service from Oracle Cloud and then install the NoSQL DB, said Joshi. “It is basically what we call ‘bring your own license.’ You bring your own licenses, you use our scripts in order to install it on the Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Service infrastructure, and you are up and running. You can run NoSQL DB on this Bare Metal Cloud platform which is very high performance. You can very quickly get NoSQL DB into Oracle Cloud using these scripts and how-to guides that we offer. We have done benchmarking using Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) and we have measured over 800,000 reads per second with under 2-millisecond latency on a three-node cluster and about 500GB of data.”
Enterprise – There are many enterprise customers that use relational database technology for a wide variety of applications, but there are also customers that have a certain class of applications where they need a NoSQL database, said Joshi. “Starting with version 4.3, we have created a new flavor of NoSQL DB called ‘NoSQL DB Basic Edition’ and it is included in the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition license with no additional cost, retroactive to Database 11.2 and onward.”
Support for Native JSON Datatypes – The typical model that Oracle has for a NoSQL database is a table data model but it is possible to have one or more columns declared as JSON to store native JSON data in those columns and there is also the Simplified Query Language that can be used to query JSON and non-JSON content from the same table, said Joshi. With this release, Oracle has also added date data type and users can query for date datatype, as well, he noted.