What is common about Oracle and SAP when it comes to In-Memory Computing? Both see this technology as merely a high performance addition to SQL-based database products. This is shortsighted and misses a significant point.

SQL Is Not Enough For New Payloads

It is interesting to note that as the NoSQL movement sails through the “trough of disillusionment,” traditional SQL and transactional datastores are re-gaining some of the attention. But, importantly, the return to SQL, even based on in-memory technology, is limiting for many newer payload types. In-Memory Computing will play a role which is much more significant than that of a mere SQL database accelerator.

Let’s take high performance computations as an example. Use cases abound: anything from traditional MonteCarlo simulations, video and audio processing, to NLP and image processing software. All can benefit greatly from in-memory processing and gain critical performance improvements - yet for systems like this a SQL database is of little, if any, help at all. In fact, SQL has absolutely nothing to do with these use cases - they require traditional HPC processing along the lines of MPI, MapReduce or MPP — and none of these are features of either Oracle or SAP Hana databases.

Or take streaming and CEP as another example. Tremendous growth in sensory, machine-to-machine and social data, generated in real time, makes streaming and CEP one of the fastest growing use cases for big data processing. Ability to ingest hundreds of thousands of events per seconds and process them in real time has practically nothing to do with traditional SQL databases - but everything to do with in-memory computing. In fact - these systems require a completely different approach of sliding window processing, streaming indexing and complex distributed workflow management - none of which are capabilities of either Oracle or SAP Hana.

Nonetheless, SQL processing was, is, and always will be with us. Ironically, it is now getting back on some of the pundits’ radars. For example, in data warehousing, where Hadoop can be used as a massive data store of record, SQL can play well. In-Memory Computing, however, plays a greater role than just a cache for a large datastore. New payload types require different processing approaches - and all benefit from the dramatic performance improvements brought by in-memory computing.

At GridGain, we are keenly aware of the self evident point: In-Memory Computing is much more significant than just getting a slow SQL database to go faster. Our end-to-end product suite delivers many additional benefits of in-memory computing, handles use cases that are impossible to address in the traditional database world. And there’s so much more to come.