Whilst Larry Ellison has unsurprisingly been distracted by the goings on in San Francisco Bay, he still took time out to give his traditional keynote to open Oracle OpenWorld 2013. So what were his major announcements? And what can we expect to hear more of during the rest of the week??

Whilst Larry Ellison has unsurprisingly been distracted by the goings on in San Francisco Bay, he still took time out to give his traditional keynote to open Oracle OpenWorld 2013. So what were his major announcements? And what can we expect to hear more of during the rest of the week??

After some brief words about the America's Cup sailing earlier in the day (Oracle TeamUSA clinging to life with two race wins), Larry went straight into his three announcements for the evening, the first of which was an In-Memory option for the 12c database - here's the announcement: In-Memory Option for Oracle 12c Database.

The key drivers behind this initiative are a desire to support real time analytics for querying of the OLTP or data warehouse, and also to increase transaction processing rates. Data is loaded into memory for active tables or partitions (which your DBA can define) and then an In-memory column store replaces your tradional analytical indexes, removing the need for the many currently required index updates when inserting a row to the database. The best part is that this new column store removes the need to tune the database with indexes as everything is held in the column store and your performance gains are driven from there. No changes are required at all to the application running on top of the database, meaning all applications that can run on the 12c database have the opportunity to benefit from this performance boost!

Larry's other two announcements, were a new M6-32 "Big Memory Machine" which could be deployed in a "supercluster" - this announcement pointed to the machine's huge processing power as ideal for the in-memory option and finally he announced the "Oracle Database Backup, Logging and Recovery Applicance": M6-32 "Big Memory Machine".

So nothing major by way of application strategy (CRM, BI, Cloud Applications etc) but perhaps the direction for the week has been set? Oracle's growth and push around engineered systems to meet the needs of Big Data and customer demands for increased performance look to be at the heart of OOW13. And if Oracle applications running on the 12c database can benefit from this in-memory option, maybe will be one of the key takeaways for the Applications teams?

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