Included in Oracle Database 12c is a compelling array of analytical features and functions that are accessible through SQL. With each release of its database Oracle continues to expand its support for advanced in-database analytics functionality. This means you can reduce your overall license costs for many types of analytical processing and eliminate the movement and staging of data to external systems to perform analysis. Eliminating data movement and staging increases the security of your data and increases the speed at which you can deliver results.
New Approximate Count Distinct Function Oracle Database 184.108.40.206 now includes a new and optimized SQL function, APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT().
The need to count distinct values is a common operation in today's data analysis. Optimizing the processing time and resource consumption by orders of magnitude while providing almost exact results speeds up any existing processing and enables new levels of analytical insight. For more information please refer to the Oracle Database SQL Language Reference, click here.
Key Benefits of Oracle's In-Database SQL Analytics
The key benefits provided by Oracle’s in-database analytical functions and features are:
1. Enhanced Developer Productivity - enable developers to perform complex analyses with much clearer and more concise SQL code. Complex tasks can now be expressed using single SQL statement which is quicker to formulate and maintain, resulting in greater productivity.
2. Improved Query Speed - processing optimizations supported by in-database analytics enable significantly better query performance. Actions which before required self-joins or complex procedural processing may now be performed in native SQL.
3. Improved Manageability - ability to access a consolidated view of all data types and sources is simplified when applications share a common relational environment rather than a mix of calculation engines with incompatible data structures.
4. Minimized Learning Effort - SQL analytic functions minimize the need to learn new keywords because the syntax leverages existing well-understood keywords.
5. Industry standards based syntax - Oracle's features conform to ANSI SQL standard and are supported by a large number of independent software vendors.
The in-database analytical functions features that are embedded inside the Oracle Database can be used to answer a wide variety of business problems. Developers and business users can access a wide range of analytic features and combine their results with other SQL queries and analytical pipelines to gain deeper insights. Oracle's Database includes the following features: