Dell (News - Alert) Software Group has announced upgrades to its Shareplex high-speed replication technology and its Toad developer tool.

Shareplex has been enhanced to provide full replication support for Oracle (News - Alert) Database 12c

As a result, Shareplex now has the ability to move data into and out of Hadoop, explained John Whittaker, director of product marketing for information management, with whom INTERNT TELEPHONY met at the recent Oracle OpenWorld event. Hadoop is initially the winner in the big data space, Whittaker added. The goal of most people using Hadoop is to drive big data analytics, he said, but many of those users also want to optimize the analytics platforms they have in place. That said, being able to move data to different environments in an efficient way is very helpful, and Shareplex can let you do that, he continued.

Darin Bartik, Dell’s vice president and general manager of database management, added that Shareplex lets you move that data in its entirety just once and update only what’s changed over time. That doesn’t impact performance, which is really important considering the extent to which companies rely on their databases these days, he said.

“Using a traditional data movement tool is not plausible,” added Bartik.

As for Toad, what’s new here is what Dell calls a connected intelligence feature. To break it down, that means that the Toad interface now offers a direct link to the broader Toad World community, which has more than 3 million annual visitors and which has been around for about a decade. That way Toad users – who tend to be database administrators, database developers, and analysts – of all skill levels can more easily leverage the expertise of the peers both within their own organizations and within the world at large.

Whittaker said this is just the beginning of more to come along these lines. In the future, he told INTERNET TELEPHONY, Dell plans to offer more on this front, such as base-lining analysis.

In other Toad news, the company now offers a Mac Edition, for Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL.