Oracle Adds Analytical Processing To MySQL Cloud Service

Matthew Broersma,
Azure: Future for Your Datacentre?

Oracle adds integrated OLAP feature to new MySQL Cloud Service, integrating OLAP with transaction processing for lower cost and improved performance

Oracle has announced the general availability of its managed MySQL Database Service, along with a feature that integrates online analytical processing (OLAP) into the platform.

The company claims its offering is faster and lower-cost than competing systems such as Amazon’s  Redshift cloud data warehouse, Google Cloud SQL and Microsoft SQL Database.

It is based on the popular MySQL database software, which Oracle acquired with Sun Microsystems in 2010. Sun previously bought MySQL in 2008.

MySQL is widely used for online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, managing data from retail or financial transactions, for instance.

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But organisations have often maintained a second database for data analysis or OLAP actions, such as finding customer trends based on the analysis of sales data.

Oracle’s system aims to remove this additional complexity, automatically populating the MySQL data into the in-memory analytics engine.

The analytical engine scales to thousands of cores and supports real-time analytics, Oracle said, claiming it is 2.7 times faster and one-third the cost of AWS Redshift.

The engine, available exclusively on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), uses in-memory, hybrid columnar processing with massive inter- and intra-node parallelism optimised for Oracle’s cloud.

A query optimiser within the service has also been enhanced to support analytical queries as well as OLTP queries, Oracle said.

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It said the service works with all MySQL-compatible tools and applications and automatically routes queries to the MySQL Analytics Engine, improving performance.

Any changes to the database are populated to the analytics engine in real time, simplifying application development and decreasing costs.

“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 Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven.

He said the new system offers developers and database administrators a “single, unified platform”.