Can Oracle database support bigdata projects?

Oracle database has come out with its latest version Oracle database 12c last July and has been adding interesting features to make sure that this robust RDBMS can cater the growing demand of big data and does provide support for JSON the Javascript Object Notation. Why should oracle provide support for JSON? MongoDB the most popular NoSQL database is based on document based model wherein documents are stored in JSON format/BSON [Binary form of JSON]. As the demand for bigdata grows, it becomes inevitable for players in RDBMS space to look for ways to support JSON format. How does Oracle database 12c handle this? Oracle database 12c does make use of CLOB datatype while storing such information. Lets take a simple example, create table json_support(id int, json_data clob); Is this optimal? Oracle does make this optimal using functions like json_value(). Function-based indexes extend the performance benefits Can Oracle database support Bigdata? Oracle database the legacy database supporting variety of systems on healthcare, finance, retail and many such sectors has been widely popular supporting OLTP, datawarehousing applications. Bigdata is the talk of this decade and many of us would like to determine if oracle can be used as BigData database. First of all what is a bigdata? Bigdata as such is a platform on which we pull data from datawarehouse, OLAP, tweets and many disparate datasources supporting structured and unstructured data. The datawarehouse can be an oracle database. Hence oracle database can be portion of bigdata platform. Oracle the master of databases is the only database in industry to come up with Oracle big data appliance and big data connector that caters the need of enterprise big data.As contrast to other databases Oracle adopts principle of leverage the existing enterprise database architecture including Oracle Exadata and incorporate big data into it to deliver big value to business Bigdata Oracle DBA career significance : Any oracle DBA who are one of the top payers in their department often have sense of insecurity not associated with their performance but owing to the fact that data lifecycle has continuously undergone evolution over the last decade. Say if you were an oracle DBA in early 2000's you will be expected to learn latest offerings from Oracle like Oracle RAC, dataguard, ASM, shell scripting to automate operational tasks of an Oracle DBA, goldengate etc. If we look at the job profile requirement of any Oracle DBA over the past two years particularly starting 2015 we see that organizations prefer an Oracle DBA who knows big data. Hadoop has essentially become an additional asset skill that Oracle DBA can leverage to find his next best job. Interestingly starting 2017 Oracel DBA's are expected to manage and maintain normal oracle databases as oracle RDS services, deploy manage and maintain big data in AWS environment In this post we are providing our opinion on what the future could be like and will it be really beneficial for a DBA to learn hadoop framework the most popular framework that supports bigdata. This is purely our analysis and its upto the readers to make decision 1) Oracle DBA will not be 100% gone - There had always been concerns about if Oracle DBA profession is to be 100% gone ever since the cloud computing came into picture. Hadoop the bigdata framework is mainly supported in EC2 machines that come as service with popular service like AWS, Microsoft Azure virtual machines etc. This does offload the hardware handling, installation of databases and much of a traditional DBA task. However, the information in the cloud needs to be managed. HEnceforth, these cloud companies still need oracle DBA 2) Big data will not wipe out your database business - I myself was wondering if bigdata is going to replace the traditional RDBMS. Based on my personal observation simple answer in No. Bigdata is for businesses to unleash the information needed for their growth , healthcare professionals to model the existing information and predict unknown facts to treat diseases well in advance. At any cost this will not impact a normal RDBMS environment In real world startups dont want a separate infrastructure team. Instead they rely on cloud and go ahead with third party hosting services like AWS, Azure etc. As such hadoop can be a valuable asset for oracle DBA's as well as DBA's in other discipline as your company will prefer you to be part of upcoming bigdata project rather not replace you or will not wipe out your job role anytime soon