Announcing Oracle Big Data Spatial and Graph

Shared with permission from Oracle's Blog: 

Today we are shipping a new big data product: Oracle Big Data Spatial and Graph. We’ve had spatial and graph analytics as an option for Oracle Database for over a decade. Now we’ve taken that expertise and used it to bring Spatial and Graph analytics to Hadoop and NoSQL. 

But first, what are spatial and graph analytics? There’s much more detail on OTN, in the data sheet, and this feature overview, so I'll just give a quick summary here. Spatial analytics involves analysis that uses location. For example, Big Data Spatial and Graph can look at datasets that include, say, zip code or postcode information and add or update city, state and country information. It can filter or group customer data from logfiles based on how near one customer is to one another. Graph analytics is more about how things relate to each other. It’s about relative, rather than absolute relationships. So you could use graph analytics to analyze friends of friends in social networks, or build a recommendation engine to recommend products to (related in the network) shoppers. 

Next question is why move this capability to Hadoop and NoSQL? First, we wanted to support the different kinds of data sets and the different workloads, which included being able to process this data natively on Hadoop and in parallel using MapReduce or in-memory structures. Secondly, our overall big data strategy has always been to minimize data movement, which means doing analysis and processing where the data lies.

Oracle Big Data Spatial and Graph is not just suitable for existing Oracle Database customers - if you need spatial or graph analytics on Hadoop this will meet your needs even if you don’t have any other Oracle software. But of course, we’re hoping that existing customers will be as interested in it as Ball Aerospace:

"Oracle Spatial and Graph is already a very capable technology. With the explosion of Hadoop environments, the need to spatially-enable workloads has never been greater and Oracle could not have introduced "Oracle Big Data Spatial and Graph" at a better time. This exciting new technology will provide value add to spatial processing and handle very large raster workloads in a Hadoop environment. We look forward to exploring how it helps address the most challenging data processing requirements."

- Keith Bingham, Chief Architect and Technologist, Ball Aerospace