"Exadata is all of that, and Exadata is already optimized for mixed workloads of in-database analytics and massively parallel processing (MPP) with a rich library of advanced analytics algorithms and models," he said via email.

One important consideration is how many of Hadoop's many sub-projects will be part of Oracle's distribution, Kobielus said.

"MapReduce and Pig are core of Hadoop modeling and development, with Mahout libraries increasingly being adopted for machine learning," he said. "HDFS and HBase are at the core of Hadoop batch and real-time data storage and management, with some uptake of Cassandra for distributed real-time analytics and transactional computing. If Oracle's Hadoop appliance doesn't incorporate most of these, plus Zookeeper and Hadoop Common tools, then it cannot be regarded as a full enterprise-ready Hadoop platform."

Mendelsohn declined to enumerate every Hadoop component Oracle plans to include in the distribution.

However, "what the people in the Hadoop community expect is going to be there," he said. "We're not going to pull out something because it competes with Oracle. It will be a complete distribution."