Oracle: shift back to red on MySQL Analytics Engine
Take a deep breath… Oracle’s eponymously named Oracle MySQL Database Service with integrated MySQL Analytics Engine is a mouthful.
Why did the company use such extended language to name one of its latest products?
Perhaps because it is optimised for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the company’s virtual software application and data service fabric.
The firm says that this is the only MySQL service that provides customers with a single platform for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytics Processing (OLAP) workloads.
Why press to provide OLTP and OLAP in such as a way? Because (says Oracle) this is the data processing combination needed to build and run ‘modern’ applications faster and more securely.
Redshift back to red?
In terms of what a modern application data processing throughput looks like, the MySQL Analytics Engine is a new in-memory analytic accelerator that scales to thousands of cores, supports real-time analytics and (so states Oracle) is ‘at least two times faster’ and up to ‘66 percent less expensive’ than Amazon Redshift, the data warehouse product from AWS.
The company reminds that MySQL is recognised as the most popular database on the planet according to the [1] Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey — and it is used by the world’s social networks, ecommerce companies and banks as well as manufacturers and high-tech companies.
While MySQL databases are commonly used for OLTP, most enterprises that run MySQL databases also need to run analytics on data stored in MySQL databases. Thi meant that, traditionally, organisations had to Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) their data into a separate analytics database, at cost.
Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, Oracle says that the Oracle MySQL Database Service with the MySQL Analytics Engine provides a fully managed scale-out service for analytics and OLTP and is the only service that enables customers to run OLTP and OLAP workloads directly from their MySQL database.
“MySQL is the most popular database among developers and is widely used by companies across industries. But, until today, MySQL users have been forced to move their data into separate incompatible data warehouses for analytics leading to higher costs and delayed answers,” said Screven. “With the MySQL engineering team’s latest innovations, Oracle is the only provider that offers developers and database administrators a single, unified platform that can easily run high performance real-time analytics against their MySQL database without requiring any change to their MySQL applications – making Oracle Cloud Infrastructure the best place to run MySQL applications.”
When developers spin up the service, data from the MySQL database is populated in the memory of the analytics engine, eliminating the need to ETL data to specialised databases.
The service works with any MySQL-compatible tools and applications and will automatically route queries to the MySQL Analytics Engine.
“The MySQL Analytics Engine is architected for massive scale and performance, accelerating MySQL performance by 400 times for analytic queries. The analytics engine offers in-memory hybrid columnar processing, massive inter- and intra-node parallelism optimised for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and distributed query processing algorithms while relieving DBAs of time-consuming ETL tasks,” notes Oracle, in a press statement.
Oracle is making the benchmark code available, so customers can run the benchmarks themselves by visiting here.