A new In-Memory Option for Oracle Database 12c will run queries 100 times faster than the current speeds for Oracle on standard data, according to Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison.

Ellison made the announcement of the in-memory option at OracleWorld in San Francisco, and said the in-memory option delivers “ungodly” performance improvements. He said updates and inserts would be two or three times faster.

The thinking behind the new storage option is that transactions run better in a row-store database, while analytics are much faster when the system uses a column-based store, according to Ellison. To get the benefits of both, Ellison says Oracle will offer a "dual format" storing both row and column formats simultaneously for the same data. Oracle Database 12c stores data in both formats simultaneously, and the information is consistent, according to Ellison, who said:

“When you update one you always update the other, and the data is consistent between those two formats.”

Alongside the use of memory, the dual store reduces or removes the need for indexes.

"Maintaining those indexes is expensive and slows down transaction processing. Let's get rid of them. Let's throw all of those analytic indexes away and replace the indexes with in-memory column sort."

To get the benefit of the in-memory option, Oracle customers will have to upgrade to release 12c, but once they’ve done that Ellison says: “You flip a switch and all your existing applications run much faster. There are no changes to SQL. There are no changes to your applications. There are no functions that are restricted. Everything that works today works with the In-Memory Option turned on and there's no data migration."

Turning on the in-memory option is simple, according to Ellison:

“You say how much memory you want to use in the computer, decide what partitions or tables are to be in memory, and drop in your analytic indexes. Queries run 100 times faster and updates, inserts run two, three times faster. All of your applications run much, much faster. Every application you wrote, every application you bought, runs without a single change.”

Alongside the new in-memory option, Ellison also announced “the fastest machine in the world for databases stored in memory”. Specifically, this is the M6-32 Big Memory Machine, which has 32TB of DRAM, uses new SPARC M6 chips that have double the cores of the M5 chips they replace, and costs $3 million. While Ellison described this as being “a fraction” of what competitors such as IBM charge, the cost of the software licenses raises the overall cost significantly.