The News: Oracle announced Oracle Database 23c Beta, the latest version of its converged database, developed to support all data types, workloads, and development styles. Oracle Database 23c code named “App Simple’ focuses on simplifying applications and development. Oracle has also added new capabilities across its database services and products to augment performance, security, and availability for mission-critical workloads. Read the Oracle Press Release here.
Oracle Advances JSONification of App Development and Real-time Graph Analysis with Oracle Database 23c Debut
Analyst Take: Oracle Database 23c “App Simple” debuted at Oracle Cloud World 2022, bringing new capabilities aimed at stimulating developer productivity for applications that are written using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Graph, or microservices, while also enhancing SQL to ease use and adding JavaScript as a stored procedure language. By introducing a pioneering new approach termed JSON Relational Duality, Oracle Database targets resolving the mismatch between how applications represent data in contrast to how relational databases store data.
JSON Relational Duality sets out to simplify application development by allowing data to be used simultaneously as application-friendly JSON documents and as database-friendly relational tables. From my view, previous attempts to fix the mismatch paradox have attained limited influence, since they have repeatedly compromised the power and simplicity of the declarative relational model. The most notable attempts include storing data in object format instead of tables, adding user-defined types in inheritance to databases, using object relational mapping tools (ORMs) to generate code that maps language objects to tables, and storing data as JSON instead of relational tables.
JSON Relational Duality architecturally integrates the ease of development of JSON in combination with the flexibility and power of the declarative relation model. As a result, we anticipate that developers can find it easier to persist app-tier data as JSON, bridging the object relational mismatch and use JSON Duality Views to ensure data can be transparently read and written as documents or tables.
We also see this capability as a hit with document developers, who will benefit from using document schemas, which are specialized for each use case, eliminating the need for writing additional code to handle data duplication or consistency issues. Developers can now easily build document-centric apps on existing relational data while benefiting from all the advanced security, availability, and scalability features of Oracle Database.
We see JSON Relational Duality as more efficient, centralized, secure, and consistent than ORM by enabling access to all the rows needed for an app use case in one call and one round trip. Developers will be able to create SQL-centric apps or analytics on data created by document-oriented apps as well as graph-centric apps. I expect the JSON Relational Duality feature will further incentivize developers to use JSON primarily as their interchange format with applications by letting the database map to and from relational tables.
Key Takeaways: Oracle Database 23c Debut Featuring Real-time Graph Analysis and JSON Relational Duality
With Oracle Database 23c, developers can now build real-time graph analysis applications against operational data directly in the Oracle Database, and at the same time benefit from its breakthrough security, high availability, and performance capabilities. Property graphs can now be built on top of database tables containing relational or JSON data and there is no longer a need to create separate graph representations. This enables real-time graph analysis in transactional systems, resulting in more rapid identification of fraud in financial transactions, delivery of recommendations in retail applications, and many other real-world use cases that benefit from graph analytics.
Oracle Database 23c is the first commercial database in the industry to support analytical and operational graphs while standardizing on SQL/PGC, an emerging ISO standard for graph queries, which can dramatically simplify the graph query syntax – that’s impressive.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
