(InfoWorld) - With Web 2.0, SaaS (software as a service), and open source grabbing all of the headlines, launches of enterprise infrastructure software that were once major IT events now sometimes seem like forgotten affairs. Certainly the new millennium marked a downturn in interest for traditional, monolithic back-end software.
Yet, boosted by virtualization, there appears to be plenty of life in old-school offerings. According to its 2007 global IT market forecast, IDC predicts that spending on infrastructure software will grow 9 percent this year, faster than any other software category.
In this "diminished" environment, Oracle's pending release of its upgraded 11g database may not grab the imagination of the technorati, but it remains significant to a vastly underestimated group of IT users.
The global database market grew 14.2 percent last year to total $15.2 billion, according to Gartner.
Oracle, which released its last major database upgrade, 10g, four years ago, already holds almost half the market. That's more than double the share of second-place IBM.
The official launch of 11g is set for next Wednesday, July 11, in a New York City ceremony overseen by Oracle president Charles Philips.
Publicly, Oracle has for the most part avoided specifics, saying that 11g will offer improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, and manageability.
Tidbits it has revealed include free migration and management tools that will let administrators oversee non-Oracle databases at the same time they manage their Oracle ones. Oracle has also said that 11g will have new compression technology that could potentially reduce customers' storage demands by two-thirds, the ability to store unstructured data faster than traditional file systems, and better partitioning.
Fleshing out the details
Web accounts by beta testers and others are now confirming those reports.
According to what appears to be a presentation by Oracle vice president of technology Mark Townsend, many of the new features are in the area of "change assurance."
These help companies save money and testing time when migrating to new hardware or making configuration changes.
For instance, features such as database replay and SQL replay let DBAs view how changes in the database or SQL code affect performance; 11g will also let users set up test environments using snapshot standbys and help automate rolling database upgrades.
Other features include online table and index redefinition, support for online hot patching and continuous availability of online applications even when they are in the midst of an upgrade, and automatic diagnostic workflow to fix problems faster.
In the area of information lifecycle management, 11g will allow DBAs for the first time to partition by interval, ref, or virtual column. It also adds a new composite way to partition.
According to an article by Jim Czuprynski, an Oracle senior instructor at Fujitsu Consulting who beta-tested 11g, some of the best new features include in-memory caches for retaining widely used, slow-changing data; better diagnosis and repair features; and enhancements to Oracle's flashback tools for data recovery.
Longtime Oracle watcher Donald Burleson notes in his list of 11g features support for schema-based Document Type Definitions for describing the internal structure of XML documents as well as more scalable Java for faster performance.
On security, an area for which Oracle has been criticized of late, Burleson says 11g will include improvements such as case-sensitive passwords and an inviolable audit vault that protects against insider threats.
Iggy Fernandez, editor of the NoCOUG Journal, the official newsletter for the Northern California Oracle Users Group, praises what he says is 11g's unheralded "learning optimizer" feature.
"When relational databases replaced hierarchical and network databases in the 1980s, the promise was that programmers would no longer need to optimize their queries by hand," said Fernandez. While no database has "completely realized" that vision, 11g, says Fernandez, is a "great step -- the query optimizer simply learns from its mistakes -- in fact, it can stop a query that is already in progress and try a different approach!"
"Performance tuning is the biggest component of database administration effort today, and the learning optimizer could produce tremendous labor savings if it works as advertised," Fernandez said.
But will users upgrade?
With 11g, will Oracle be able to extend its lead over IBM -- whose release of DB2 9 "Viper" last summer did not lead to mass early uptake, according to the Gartner figures -- by convincing users to rush and upgrade?
Kevin Closson, chief software architect for clustering vendor Polyserve, says yes, based on how stable this release already is known to be.
"From everything I've seen in this release, there should be no technical reasons holding back customers' adoption," Closson wrote in his blog.
But Amy Stuemky, database administrator for travel tour operator Globus, says her organization is just starting to move its 50 Oracle databases to 10g.
"Our philosophy with Oracle is that it is too bleeding-edge with any first release," Stuemky said. And the company is only moving now because Oracle's regular support, called Premier Support, is about to end.
"Oracle almost pushes you [to upgrade] by desupporting its stuff," she said.
Fernandez agrees that expecting users to rush to 11g any faster than they did with prior versions would be unrealistic.
"There is just too much effort involved in testing and upgrading critical business systems, and new releases can be plagued with software bugs," he wrote. "Speaking for myself, I would prefer Oracle to fix the bugs that still remain in the previous version instead of give us a feature-packed new version!"
Oracle will go slow with one aspect of 11g. For its free Express Edition aimed at students and developers, which Oracle debuted in 2005, the company won't release an upgrade until the more stable 11g R2 comes out, according to an Austrian developer, Slavojub Krishan, who cited conversations with Oracle executives at a recent developer conference. |
(InfoWorld) - Oracle has finally committed to a launch date for the next major release of its database. Appropriately enough, the vendor plans to unveil Oracle Database 11g on July 11.
Oracle sent out an invitation on Wednesday about the launch event, which will take place in New York and will be hosted by company President Charles Phillips and Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle's senior vice president of database and server technologies.
The vendor's primary database competitors are IBM and Microsoft.
Oracle began laying out the groundwork for 11g in October at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, where executives talked in general terms about the upcoming release.
They said the database would feature improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, manageability and what the vendor dubbed "diagnosability." In addition, the executives referred to new compression technology that could potentially reduce customers' storage demands by two-thirds and the ability for 11g to store unstructured data faster than traditional file systems. The new database is also expected to include a variety of partitioning capabilities.
Oracle again talked up 11g in similar broadbrush terms at the Collaborate Oracle user group conference in Las Vegas in April. Customer issues the vendor said it hoped to address with the new database included management, security and data recovery.
In beta testing since September, Oracle Database 11g is the successor to 10g releases 1 and 2. The "g" following the number refers to grid computing. Oracle shipped the first release of 10g in February 2004.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from over 800 sessions. Register today! |