In a surprise move Tuesday Oracle wheeled out its Big Data Appliance.

That’s the one it said in October would be ready sometime in the first half. Only nobody believed it meant early in the first half. Heck, it’s not even clear anybody thought Oracle could make the first half at all and it probably couldn’t have met so early a date if it hadn’t been secretly closeted for months with Cloudera.

It’s using Cloudera’s version of Hadoop in the thing rather than lose time dicking around rolling its own.

Cloudera is the oldest, most established of the Hadoop start-ups whose ranks now include MapR (tight with EMC, its Greenplum database and the EMC Data Computing Appliance) and Hortonworks (buddies with Microsoft and SQL Server 2012) and it’s assumed to have more customers and more experience than anybody else.

In response John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder of MapR, said, “It’s ironic that the world’s largest database vendor would enter the Big Data market by being a hardware provider and partnering for software. It appears they are taking a page from their Linux playbook where they partner until prepared to support their own distribution. Unlike Linux, Hadoop requires innovations in reliability, performance and ease of use to drive adoption like those brought to market by MapR.”

Observers say Oracle’s use of Cloudera shows it’s serious. Big Data is supposed to be a $70 billion industry growing at maybe 20% a year and Oracle wants more than its fair share so it’s not letting any grass grow under its feet.

To prove it’s serious, Oracle is low-balling the highly engineered system. Rather than charge millions like it does for its Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics appliances, Oracle’s Big Data Appliance will go for a mere $450,000 a rack with maintenance on both the hardware and software running only 12% a year. The price is a third less than expected.

For the money customers will get a full rack of 18 Sun Fire x86 servers with 216 CPU cores, 864GB main memory, 648TB of raw disk storage, 40 Gb/s InfiniBand internal connectivity and 10 Gb/s Ethernet connectivity, perfectly sized for the greatest number of customers.

Users also get Cloudera’s open source Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager software, Cloudera’s Google Big Table-ish HBase, an open source distribution of R, the programming language, the Community Edition of Oracle’s NoSQL Database, Oracle’s HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and Oracle Linux, the Oracle fork of Red Hat. The widgetry can be used in multiple ways.

Oracle and Cloudera are going to split support, with Cloudera getting the hard software questions.

Oracle’s also got a bunch of separately priced connectors so users can integrate data stored in the CDH Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or Oracle NoSQL Database with Oracle Database 11g. The four connectors cost $2,000 per server processor.

Betcha Oracle figures it can up-sell Big Data Appliance users on Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics since everything’s tightly integrated.

It’s also possible that Oracle might want to buy Cloudera eventually depending on how things go and how its vision of itself as a database company morphs. Currently they’re bound together by a non-exclusive multi-year alliance.

A huge win for Cloudera, the start-up is reveling in the validation it’s getting from Oracle and all the feet Oracle can put on the street. It can probably anticipate an uptick in its consulting and training business. It also figures the Oracle ecosystem will produce new tools, applications, systems and services in support the CDH platform.

Oracle zigged when it was expected to zag Tuesday and came in with a nasty fiscal Q2 miss that immediately caused its stock price to buckle close to 10% after-hours for fear the results are a harbinger of the broad-based tech slowdown everybody’s afraid of given the newspaper headlines, especially out of Europe.

Oracle in its conference call never once said it was, claiming instead that Q2 was a one-off event and that “short of a global meltdown” Q3 “won’t be a repeat.”

Still, the news ricocheted through high-tech leaving the Nasdaq a blood-red mess. Oracle itself is now down about 13%.

Watchers are still trying to figure out what happened. Obviously there was a struggle to close deals in Q2, which ended with the hateful November. Ellison, Catz and Hurd are three pretty slick articles, still it’s hard to believe that the company didn’t already have the management controls in place to monitor last-minute approvals but that’s what Catz said. Approvals came through – lurchingly and apparently with more, higher-up signatures than they used to need – and Oracle has had to figure out how to deal with that wrinkle going forward. Apparently any deals missed are expected to close this quarter.

Both its Q2 revenue and earnings were short of consensus. It reported earning 54 cents a share, up 6%, on revenues of $8.79 billion, up 2% year-over-year, when the Street thought it would do 57 cents on $9.23 billion. GAAP income was up 17% to $2.2 billion or 43 cents a share. Unfortunately Oracle had guided to revenue of $8.99 billion-$9.34 billion.

It said new licenses were up 2% to $2 billion when it had guided to an increase of 6%-16% and updates and product support was up 9% to $4 billion.

It’s supposedly not seeing a slowdown in Europe. It even said the US public sector was pretty good. CRM is supposed to be up close to 20%. Most of everything else, however, looks off. Currency also turned into a headwind.

Hardware was down 14% to $953 million – when it was supposed to be flat to down 5% – and that’s despite what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said was accelerated sales of engineered systems.

According to him “Exadata growth was well over 100% compared to last year, and Exalogic grew more than 100% on a sequential basis. We shipped our first SPARC SuperCluster in Q2 and expect to begin deliveries of our Exalytics system and the Oracle Big Data Appliance in Q3.”

Evidently the product transition from the T3 to T4 Sparc chip was a hold-up since it requires a brand new system and people aren’t going to buy outdated equipment so late in the cycle. In addition, Oracle could only deliver a few SuperClusters since they only became available at the end of the quarter. But Hurd maintains that Oracle pipeline is as full as it’s ever been, with Exalogic ramping faster than the Exadata machine, something he’s said before.

Larry said 200 Exadata/logic machines were sold in Q2 and prophesized that 300 would be sold this quarter and 400 in Q4. By then they’ll be a billion-dollar business that he said will double next fiscal year. Bernstein ace analyst Toni Sacconaghi noticed that wasn’t quite as many as previously forecast and Ellison had to admit he was right. Oracle might not triple its installed base, maybe it’ll only be up 2.5x, Ellison said, but “It’s still spectacular.” Oracle cut the appliance projections from 2,000 to 1,000.

Oracle’s GAAP operating margin was 35%; its non-GAAP margin was 45%, which it’s pleased enough with, and it claims it should return to pre-Sun margins soon.

Oracle’s workforce was up 1,700 salesmen in the first half.

Co-president Mark Hurd said in a statement, “We believe that this increase in our field organization combined with innovative new products like Fusion Cloud ERP and Cloud CRM will enable solid organic growth in the second half of this year.”

Oracle exceeded estimates in the four previous quarters and it’s going to have tough compare this quarter because last year was sensational. It’s forecasting total revenues will be up 3%-7% this quarter. That would work out to somewhere between $9 billion and $9.42 billion. It said new software licenses would be flat to up 10% and hardware down 5% to 15%. Adjusted earning should be 56 cents-59 cents. The Street had it down for 58 cents on $9.46 billion.

To console investors Oracle said it could buy back another $5 billion worth of stock at some point.

It’s got $31 billion in the bank.