Speaking this week as it announced its latest figures, computing giant Oracle confirmed that it will be vigorously pursuing Big Data.

This is a goal that CEO Larry Ellison argues plays to Oracle’s origins as a pure database firm, something that is now a long way behind it.

“Oracle hasn't been just an RDBMS for about 20 years,” he argues. “A long time ago, after relational databases came out, there was a next-generation [of] databases that were called object databases. And everyone talked about, ‘Well, object databases are going to replace relational databases’. What actually happened is that object database capabilities got integrated into the Oracle Database.

“So Oracle seized just the relational database. It became a relational and object database. And then there were these things called text databases for text search, and those were separate databases. And Oracle then incorporated text search and text capability into the Oracle Database. And then there were these things called XML databases and separate XML databases. Then Oracle integrated XML capability into it.”

Now that database evolution has extended into the Big Data space courtesy of the Hadoop open source project. “After Hadoop finishes filtering the data, the place you want to put that data is an Oracle Database, and that's what a lot of our customers are doing,” says Ellison. “We are exploiting the trend, the big data technology and the big data trend by building a Hadoop appliance that attaches to the Oracle Exadata database or any Oracle Database for that matter.

“But you don't have to buy our Hadoop appliance if you can use whatever servers you want running Hadoop, and we provide the interface between Hadoop and the Oracle Database. The idea is you should be able to put all of your data regardless of data type into the Oracle Database where it can be stored securely and reliably. And you could search it and get answers to your questions very quickly.”