Oracle OpenWorld has announced new in-memory options in Oracle 12c, with a focus on columnar store technology that leverages compression and parallel query processing. However, this technology has become commoditized and is not enough to solve analytics problems due to the growing data volumes. The company is pushing expensive hardware to justify higher licensing fees, diverting attention from the more important trend of running on commodity hardware. In-memory stores eliminate I/O costs, enabling incredible performance on commodity servers where DRAM is just as fast. The shift towards elastic computing and distributed systems is changing the way customers think about IT infrastructure, with technologies like AWS and private cloud offerings becoming increasingly popular.