Oracle is doing a NoSQL as a strategic move. They'd done this before with the acquisitions of BerkeleyDB's and Coherence's companies. But their cash cow will continue to be their ubiquitous RDBMS for many years to come. You know, just in case the world wakes up one day and falls in love with NoSQL, they will have something to sell under this brand.
I deal with passionate Oracle RDBMS users on a daily basis and (very good) technologies as BerkeleyDB and Coherence are nothing but esoteric toys they will hardly use anytime soon. So will be this NoSQL database that will probably be given away as open source.
Oracle has been doing NoSQL since before NoSQL was cool.
They've had BerkeleyDB since 2006. The real issue is not technology so much as economics. The heart of the matter is that no startup is going to shell out what Oracle wants for licensing/support contracts.
Kind of depends if this is simply an integration (e.g. a feed to/from Hadoop), another key-value store (OMG, not another), something like composite column types (ala PostgreSQL), a re-birth of Object DB Extensions (please not) or smarts structured data (e.g. better XML search). All of those feel like a band aid. Would love to see something truly innovative here.
I deal with passionate Oracle RDBMS users on a daily basis and (very good) technologies as BerkeleyDB and Coherence are nothing but esoteric toys they will hardly use anytime soon. So will be this NoSQL database that will probably be given away as open source.