Oracle and SAP, longtime competitors in selling databases, middleware and enterprise applications, nonetheless play nice together when it comes to engineering solutions for shared customers. After all, thousands of IT shops worldwide use one or more of each company’s products, so naturally, the common goal is to make customers happy.
With this as background, Oracle announced July 23 that its year-old in-memory database has been certified by SAP for use with SAP packages based on the SAP NetWeaver 7.x platform. So, users won’t have to shell out $600,000 or more for an SAP HANA in-memory database if they already have Oracle’s.
As a result, customers now can use SAP applications alongside Oracle Database In-Memory to perform real-time data analytics to go with real-time transaction processing on their existing applications.
In some ways, this isn’t all that newsy, because the July 23 announcement is only the latest co-operative deal in the longstanding collaboration between the two companies, Andy Mendelsohn, executive vice president of database server technology at Oracle, told eWEEK. Earlier this year, SAP certified Oracle Database 12c, Oracle Exadata Database Machine X5-2 and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X5-2 for use with SAP solutions.
As much as Oracle and SAP like to position themselves as marketplace enemies, there are plenty of quieter, friendlier engineering encounters on the sites of common customers about which few people hear.
“Oracle and SAP have been collaborating on the engineering basis for many years to make sure that the latest and greatest Oracle database IT is available to SAP applications customers,” Mendelsohn said.
Oracle Database In-Memory debuted a year ago. In its first year, sales have been nearly triple that of all new Oracle Database 11g options combined during their first year, Mendelsohn said.
Oracle Database In-Memory implements a dual-format architecture that delivers fast analytics together with high-performance online transaction processing (OLTP), Mendelsohn said. It processes data at a rate of billions of rows per second rather than millions and allows analytics to run directly in OLTP databases, further reducing delays and improving accuracy, Mendelsohn said.
Oracle Database In-Memory is easily deployed under any existing application that is compatible with the Oracle Database. No application changes are required, Mendelsohn said.