Credit: Dreamstime
Oracle is combining OLTP (online transaction processing) and OLAP (online analytical processing) services in its open source MySQL database in the Oracle Cloud, via Oracle MySQL Database Service with the MySQL Analytics Engine.
With this Oracle Cloud service being introduced December 2, users gain the ability to run sophisticated analytics against their operational MySQL database. The MySQL Analytics Engine is an in-memory analytics accelerator that can scale to thousands of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cores.
Positioned to compete with the Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouse, the Oracle MySQL Database Service with the MySQL Analytics Engine saves users from having to integrate with a separate analytics database. Database administrators and developers gain a unified platform for OLTP and OLAP workloads. OLAP has not been a specialty of MySQL in the past.
Capabilities of the MySQL Analytics Engine include:
- In-memory, hybrid columnar processing
- Inter-node and intra-node parallelism optimised for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- Distributed query processing algorithms
To add the analytics capabilities, the MySQL optimiser was enhanced to support analytics while the parser itself was unaltered. Hence, the existing MySQL syntax continues to work as is. With the analytics not requiring maintenance or development of any indexes, data updates made by users are propagated to the analytics engine and available to be queried immediately.
Supporting large volumes of data and complex queries, MySQL Database Service with MySQL Analytics Engine has use cases such as fraud detection or decision support.
