Oracle Corp. is bringing the capabilities of its unified management and monitoring system to MySQL environments as part of an update meant to make the open-source database more competitive against non-relational alternatives that are better at handling modern analytic workloads. The company hopes to make up what its software lacks in flexibility with more of the kind of features that can help CIOs preserve their existing technology investments, a hallmark tactic from the days when Larry Ellison was still at the helm.

Yet while it may have the not-quite-retired founder‘s signature all over it, the move to integrate Oracle Enterprise with MySQL is particularly distinctive. The database giant is merely the latest in a string of major vendors to show a renewed interest in delivering the much-touted “single pane of glass” approach of managing infrastructure. Most recently, Red Hat Inc. – the open-source ying to Oracle’s proprietary yang – extended its Satellite platform to VMware-virtualized environments, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services.

Even after the upgrade, however, Enterprise Manager still works with a considerably larger number of third party technologies than Satellite, an edge that the addition of support for MySQL furthers on another important frontier. With the integration, customers can now collect operational data about their environments to gain visibility into configuration settings, see whether instances are living up to performance expectations and monitor infrastructure availability.

In addition, Enterprise Manager automates the process of discovering new databases and makes it possible for admins to set limits on the amount of hardware resources a particular instance can use. The functionality builds on the May introduction of MySQL Fabric, a tool Oracle developed in a bid to address the lack of centralized management capabilities for the database.

The open-source product includes features for sharing multiple instances at once and provides an automatic failover function that can help ensure an environment remains available even if the master server goes offline. Complementing the integration with Enterprise Manager is a set of premium extensions to Oracle’s commercial MySQL version that extend that consolidated control to several other key areas of management.

The suite packs a new security module that combines public-key encryption with asymmetric cryptography, an enhanced auditing addon that makes it possible to filter logs by user and a pre-built repository for keeping track of database versions. Also included in the bundle is an expanded edition of MySQL Enterprise Backup that simplifies server cloning, handles large datasets more effectively and offers the ability to move data to and from Amazon Inc.’s S3 object service, which provides a cheap way to store low-priority workloads at a remote location.