It is based on Oracle's Berkeley DB product. "Berkeley DB is probably the most popular key-value store out there on the Web," but it uses a single index, Mendelsohn said. For the NoSQL database, Oracle "turned it from a single index to a distributed implementation, where you could have maybe 100 indexes," he said.

Like Berkeley DB, the NoSQL database will be available in both open-source and commercial versions. The latter will probably gain premium features over time, Mendelsohn said.

Meanwhile, Oracle recognizes that administrators and developers may not be familiar with programming models like Hadoop, Mendelsohn said.

"Hadoop as it currently stands is a very niche technology," according to Mendelson. "Everybody's talking about it, but who in our enterprise installed base can use something like this?"

That's why tools like the data-integrator adapter and loader for Hadoop are so important, since they help bridge that skills gap, he said.