G.7 Changes in Oracle Big Data Appliance Release 4 (4.2)

The following are changes in Oracle Big Data Appliance release 4 (4.2):

New Features

  • Software Upgrades

    • Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop 5.4.0

    • Cloudera Manager 5.4.0

    • Perfect Balance 2.4.0

    • Oracle Big Data SQL 1.1

    • No SQL Database 3.2.5

    • Oracle Linux 6.6 and 5.11

    • JDK 8u45

    See Oracle Big Data Appliance Software User's Guide.

  • Hardware Upgrades

    • Oracle Big Data Appliance is now shipped with 8 TB disk drives

  • Elastic Configuration

    • Oracle Big Data Appliance now provides the flexibility of adding one or more servers on a starter rack using Big Data Appliance X5-2 High Capacity Nodes plus InfiniBand Infrastructure. You can add up to 12 additional servers on a starter rack.

      See Expanding an Oracle Big Data Appliance Starter Rack.

  • Automatic Installation Support

    • Spark-on-YARN is deployed automatically

    • Oracle Spatial and Graph is installed and configured automatically

  • Oracle Big Data SQL 1.1

    • Copy to BDA

      This utility enables you to copy relatively static tables from an Oracle database into Hadoop, with the purpose of improving query times.

      See Oracle Big Data Appliance Software User's Guide.

    • Oracle NoSQL Database Support

      Oracle databases on Oracle Exadata Database Machine can use Oracle Big Data SQL to connect to clusters running Oracle NoSQL Database.

    • Parquet Support

      CDH 5.2 and later versions include Hive 0.13, which supports the Apache Parquet file format. This file format is used by Cloudera Impala and other Hadoop software.

      See Oracle Big Data Appliance Software User's Guide.

Other Changes

  • Oracle Big Data Appliance X5-2

    Oracle Big Data Appliance 4.2 software supports Oracle Big Data Appliance X5-2 and earlier version server hardware.

    See "Server Components".

  • Oracle Big Data Appliance Configuration Generation Utility

    This utility generates two new configuration files:

    • network.json: Supersedes BdaDeploy.json. For software upgrades, Mammoth converts the existingBdaDeploy.json to network.json. New installations must have network.json.

    • networkexpansion.json: Supersedes BdaExpansion.json.

    See "About the Configuration Files".

  • CDH Deployment

    Mammoth uses parcels instead of RPMs to deploy CDH.

  • Apache Sentry

    Installation of Apache Sentry does not require sentry-provider.ini as a prerequisite.

  • Microsoft Active Directory Server in Mammoth

    Support for directly using Microsoft Active Directory named as Active Directory Kerberos in Mammoth.

  • Oracle Linux Support

    Oracle Linux 5 support for Oracle Big Data Appliance X5-2 servers.

  • Cloudera Navigator Trustee Server

    Cloudera Navigator Trustee Server installer package and documentation are now shipped in Mammoth. It must be manually installed on a separate server.

Deprecated Features

The following features are deprecated in this release, and may be desupported in a future release:

  • Mammoth Reconfiguration Utility

    The bdacli utility supersedes mammoth-reconfig. The mammoth-reconfig utility is only needed to change the disk encryption password.

    See "bdacli".

  • MapReduce 1 (MRv1)

    YARN (MRv2) supersedes MRv1. Users who want to continue to use MRv1 on Oracle Big Data Appliance versions 3.x and 4.x should contact Oracle Support before using Mammoth to patch or upgrade the software.

  • Disk Encryption

    A new encryption system that is more flexible and robust will replace the current system in an upcoming release.