The rapid and disruptive shift in the industry toward those business-driven themes have led Ellison to assert a bold claim: new competitive dynamics in the database sector will raise the stakes for Teradata and other relatively lower-profile players that have generally stayed under the radar of Oracle, IBM, and even Microsoft SQL Server.

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Microsoft saw the Raw Iron announcement as an attempt by Oracle to offer another competitive database to Microsoft's SQL Server.

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Oracle first announced support for big data with its new Big Data Appliance and Oracle NoSQL database at the Open World conference, and was followed by Microsoft which announced Hadoop support for SQL Server 2012.

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