IT is a global game of king of the mountain. The view is lovely from the top, but everyone else is looking to pull you down with new innovations in products, better services, and disruptive go-to-market strategies. Oracle has long held the crown for databases and a number of related business applications, yet is surely feeling some pressure from the ravenous hordes below. Two popular angles of attack have been in-memory and/or NoSQL databases. The goal of players such as Amazon (with DynamoDB), Apache Cassandra, MemSQL, MarkLogic, MongoDB, NuoDB, and many others has been to differentiate on the capabilities of their newer platforms to hopefully displace, or more likely find a niche alongside, the popular Oracle database. Even other industry titans like IBM (with DB2 BLU Acceleration) and Microsoft (with SQL Server 2014) have brought in-memory options to market with great fanfare.