Specifically, Oracle has integrated Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager software into the Oracle Big Data Appliance. The Oracle Big Data Appliance is an engineered system that aims to provide a high-performance, scalable data -processing environment for handling large databases.

Cloudera isn't the only Apache Hadoop-based provider Oracle could have chosen to partner with. On the start-up side, there's Hadapt, DataStax, and MapR. However, Andy Mendelsohn, senior VP of Oracle Database Server Technologies, said the maturity of Cloudera's products and the company's expertise on the enterprise level helped make them the right choice.

Mutually Beneficial

Oracle's Big Data Appliance is competing against similar offerings from IBM and EMC. The appliance is an engineered system of hardware and software that incorporates Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop and Cloudera Manager, an open source distribution of R, Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition, Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and Oracle Linux running on Oracle's Sun servers. CDH is the most widely deployed commercial distribution of Apache Hadoop for the enterprise.

Mike Olson, co-founder and CEO of Cloudera, said the partnership is expected to deliver the first engineered system designed to make Apache Hadoop work together with Oracle's product stack, creating a solution that can address the most demanding analytic workloads.

Big Data Acquisitions

Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, said the partnership is a win-win. As he sees it, Oracle is coming late to the Hadoop-based "Big Data" party. He points to EMC's Greenplumb acquisition and IBM's Netezza acquisition, as well as HP's Vertica acquisition in this space as evidence.

"Oracle kind of pooh-poohed the Big Data market for a while as its competitors moved forward more aggressively. We've seen the company do something of an about-face over the past six or eight months. Oracle has gotten on the bandwagon but I think it's also reflective of the fact that there is a bandwagon to get onto," King said.

"Hadoop and Big Data represent a discrete market that is complimentary to, but also separate from the traditional relational database business that is Oracle's bread and butter. But they clearly had to have a product in this space. It's not something they could ignore."

Ellison's Intel Comments

With so many Big Data acquisitions in recent years, will Oracle ultimately move to acquire Cloudera? That remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: The partnership flies in the face of something Oracle CEO Larry Ellison recently told BusinessWeek.

"Ellison said Intel had no place in Oracle's future. It's interesting to see that the Cloudera-based appliance is going to run on x86 servers. Hadoop typically runs on x86. One of Hadoop Big Data's value propositions is that it can run on industry standard servers," King said.

"There have been some talks about a number of companies that would offer Hadoop plug-ins for other microprocessor architectures, but until Oracle can come up with something that can run Hadoop on SPARC I'm afraid that x86 will continue to have a history at Oracle."

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