"An in-memory accelerator could mean many things," analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research said in an interview Thursday. "Managing data in memory in connection with disk-centric data management is a lot harder than just managing data in memory."

"If your management is basically in-memory, and you persist the data to disk in close imitation of your in-memory data structure, that works fine, but may not provide great disk-centric performance," Monash added.

Oracle's plan for a Hadoop-related product comes as little surprise, given the widespread attention the technology has received of late from data warehousing and analytics vendors.

In the meantime, sales of Exadata and of the Exalogic application server are going swimmingly, Hurd said during the conference call. The "ramp-up" for Exalogic is going even better than Exadata's, he said.