The latest version of Oracle NoSQL Database supports tabular data model, secondary indexing, security enhancements via Oracle Wallet integration, and data center enhancements. Oracle recently announced the release of version 3.0 of the distributed key-value database.
Tabular Data Model: The new tabular data structure simplifies application data modeling by leveraging existing schema design concepts enabling integration with SQL-based applications. Table model is layered on top of the distributed key-value structure and inherits its advantages.
Secondary Indexing: Primary key only based indexing limits number of low latency access paths. Sometimes applications need non-primary-key based paths to support the use cases for the whole solution. Secondary indexing helps with improved performance of queries by allowing the creation of secondary indexes on any value field.
Security: The new release also supports OS-independent, cluster-wide password-based user authentication for application security. Session-level SSL encryption and network port restrictions give protection from network intrusion and integration with Oracle Wallet product enables protection from unauthorized access to sensitive data.
Data center performance enhancements include automatic failover to secondary data centers which enables business continuity for applications. Secondary server zones can also be used to offload read-only workload use cases like analytics, report generation, and data exchange between the servers for better workload management.
Oracle NoSQL Database is built on Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition storage engine and adds a layer of services for use in distributed environments. It uses an indexed, Btree storage mechanism for storing unstructured data. The database supports ACID compliant transactions and partitioning of data (sharding) in real time.
The database also provides single-master, multi-replica database replication where transactional data is delivered to all replica nodes with durability policies per transaction. In the event the master replica node fails, a PAXOS-based automated fail-over election process minimizes downtime allowing for hot-standby.
Oracle NoSQL database also supports Apache Hadoop Integration with KVAvroInputFormat and KVInputFormat classes to read data from the NoSQL Database natively into Hadoop Map/Reduce jobs.
The Enterprise Edition of the NoSQL database includes the following additional capabilities:
Oracle Database External Tables Support: Oracle database integration includes support for external table that allows fetching of Oracle NoSQL data using SQL statements. Once NoSQL data is exposed through external tables, one can access the data using standard JDBC and visualize it through enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) tools.
Integration with other Oracle products include the following:
- Oracle Event Processing (OEP) engine provides read access to Oracle NoSQL Database using the NoSQL Database cartridge. Once the cartridge is configured, Oracle Continuous Query Language (CQL) queries can be used to query the data.
- NoSQL database also has integration with Oracle Semantic Graph to store large volumes of RDF data as triplets/quadruplets using the Jena Adapter. The adapter enables fast access to graph data stored in Oracle NoSQL Database using SPARQL queries.
- Integration with Oracle Coherence allows Oracle NoSQL Database to be used as a cache allowing applications to directly access cached data from Oracle NoSQL Database.
Oracle NoSQL Database 3.0 Enterprise Edition and Community Edition are available for download on Oracle Technology Network.