HeatWave provides the simplicity of integrated, automated, and secure AI, transactions, and lakehouse-scale analytics in one cloud service. You can use a single HeatWave capability, such as HeatWave MySQL for example, and you can also take advantage of all the other built-in HeatWave capabilities at no additional cost—with great synergies when doing so. Moreover, you can deploy HeatWave–powered apps in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure.

HeatWave Services

In this 3-part blog series, we’ll help you understand how customers succeed with HeatWave by considering three very common patterns:

  1. Migrate MySQL-based databases to HeatWave MySQL
  2. Innovate with AI using HeatWave GenAI and HeatWave AutoML
  3. Get insights from all your data with HeatWave Lakehouse

In this first blog, we’ll start with pattern #1: Migrate MySQL-based databases to HeatWave MySQL

 

Common challenges when using MySQL-based databases, and how HeatWave MySQL helps address them

Concerns about performance, reliability, security, and costs

The so-called “bottom-up” adoption (as opposed to top-down adoption mandated by management) is very typical for MySQL, and IT managers can often be surprised by the extent to which MySQL is used within their organization.

Indeed, developers or analysts facing an ad-hoc need frequently choose to build an application based on MySQL—an open source database renowned for its performance, reliability, and ease of use that enables them to quickly get the job done. While such applications may not be critical to the organization initially, this often changes rapidly, and many applications built on MySQL Community Edition can become essential for one or more departments. Several questions tend to surface at that point, such as:

  • How is data protected? A crucial point considering that 60% of data breaches are due to unapplied patches.
  • Do we comply with regulatory requirements?
  • What is our High Availability setup?
  • What is our backup policy?
  • Can we get immediate professional technical support if needed?
  • Who’s responsible for the administration of the database(s) and what happens if this person leaves?

Performance and scalability may not be optimized, and applications can run older MySQL versions, without the latest features.

Organizations face those common issues whether MySQL Community Edition is deployed on-premises or self-managed in the cloud, for example running on Amazon EC2.

Businesses may also have deployed MySQL-based managed database services from AWS or other cloud providers, and can struggle with performance, availability, security, and runaway costs issues. For example, Grupo DTG migrated from Amazon RDS to HeatWave MySQL and noted that “We thought AWS would give us a whole world of high availability, but in practice, it was not delivered.” By migrating to HeatWave MySQL, Grupo DTG improved customer satisfaction, gained new business contracts, boosted operational agility, and reduced TCO by 20%. They commented “The high availability of HeatWave MySQL has completely changed our lives, and we are no longer constantly stressed… with HeatWave MySQL on OCI, we were able to achieve the same level of performance as AWS using only half the amount of CPU and RAM.”

HeatWave MySQL is a fully managed database service—built by the MySQL development team—that automates patching, high-availability management, backups, and upgrades.

  • You get access to the latest MySQL features and get technical support from experts having access to the MySQL engineers.
  • HeatWave MySQL is the only MySQL cloud service built on MySQL Enterprise Edition, with integrated advanced features letting you easily implement additional security measures to help protect data throughout its lifecycle and comply with regulatory requirements.
  • It’s the only cloud service integrating the HeatWave data processing engine, acting as in-memory query accelerator for MySQL. HeatWave transparently improves MySQL query performance by orders of magnitude.
  • The built-in HeatWave Autopilot provides workload-aware, machine learning–powered automation for both OLTP and OLAP workloads. It improves performance and scalability without requiring database tuning expertise, increases the productivity of developers and DBAs, and helps eliminate human errors. As all other built-in HeatWave capabilities, HeatWave Autopilot is available at no additional cost to HeatWave customers.

HeatWave MySQL is also significantly less expensive than other MySQL-based services, as demonstrated by this comparison.

MySQL cloud services comparison

Complex and costly to use separate databases for transactions and analytics

Transactional databases such as MySQL or Amazon Aurora are not designed for analytic processing. As a result, customers must move all their data to a separate analytics database via a complex and time-consuming ETL process requiring multiple cloud services.

To use separate databases is complex and costly

  • Using several cloud services increases complexity, costs, and requires multiple skills.
  • You don’t get real-time analytics as data can already be stale by the time it’s available in the separate analytics database.
  • Security and compliance risks increase as data moves between data stores.

Ultimately, this complexity delays business decisions.

By contrast, HeatWave MySQL allows you to run both transactions and real-time analytics in one cloud service:

  • You eliminate the cost, complexity, latency, and risks of ETL duplication to a separate analytics database.
  • You can use existing MySQL skills to obtain real-time analytics.
  • Since HeatWave is a native MySQL solution, existing MySQL applications work without changes.

Our customer Genius Sonority designs, develops, and operates video games for consoles and smart devices. For improved game players’ experience, and to adjust the difficulty level of the game, the company needs to analyze game usage and campaign participation rates in real time. The Genius Sonority IT staff had to transfer transactional data to a separate analytics platform to do so. Moving data from one data store to another caused a delay in analyzing data and required the development of additional scripts using several different tools, adding time and increasing costs.

HeatWave MySQL enabled the Genius Sonority developers to run both OLTP and OLAP workloads directly from their MySQL Database, eliminating the need for data movement and integration with a separate analytics platform. Complex analytics query performance improved by 90X without modifications to the existing gaming applications. Before using HeatWave MySQL, data analysis took 2 to 3 hours with special data processing and programming. With HeatWave MySQL, the queries take only 2 to 3 minutes.

Nucleus Research interviewed multiple organizations using Oracle HeatWave and found a 30 times improvement in processing time in OLAP queries and 100 times for hybrid OLTP/OLAP queries. You can access the report here.

 

Common use cases

HeatWave MySQL is frequently implemented for applications such as:

  • Digital marketing: real-time analysis of the impact of marketing/advertising campaigns, customer data analytics to build effective campaigns… etc.
  • Fintech: payment applications, trading platforms, financial CRMs …etc.
  • Gaming/virtual playgrounds: real-time analysis end user engagement, participation in campaigns…etc.
  • SaaS ISVs: platforms for video conferences, Point of Sales systems, transport management solutions…etc.
  • Education platforms: learning, evaluations…etc.
  • Communication/connectivity solutions: voice, chatbots, call center solutions…etc.

For all those use cases, relying on a MySQL Database service providing great performance, reliability, security, and cost-effective scalability was key to our customers. And for many of them, the opportunity to eliminate the complexity, latency, risks, and costs of ETL duplication to a separate analytics database was also paramount.

 

Easily migrate with the HeatWave MySQL migration program

The migration program allows you to confidently migrate to HeatWave MySQL using a proven end-to-end approach. You get access to free step-by-step guides outlining best practices to migrate to HeatWave MySQL on OCI or AWS from various sources, technical training resources, as well as expert guidance from Oracle engineers and Oracle partners. You can even request free migration help from an Oracle MySQL expert.

 

Conclusion

As discussed in this first part of our blog series, HeatWave MySQL can help you:

  • Run transactional applications using a fully managed MySQL Database service providing high performance, reliability, security, and cost-effective scalability.
  • Get real-time analytics on your transactional data without ETL duplication to a separate analytics database.
  • Benefit from other built-in capabilities at no additional cost for lakehouse-scale analytics, machine learning, and generative AI.

The HeatWave MySQL migration program can help you easily and rapidly migrate, and you can even request free expert guidance.

Want to give HeatWave MySQL a try? HeatWave is now included in Always Free Services on OCI, which means that you can develop and run small-scale applications using HeatWave MySQL for an unlimited time.

Don’t hesitate to contact us, we’ll be happy to discuss how we could help.

 

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