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Andy Mendelsohn Reviews "The Year of Oracle Database 11g" at Oracle OpenWorld
For anyone who may have missed the news about Oracle Database 11g during the last year, Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president for Oracle database development, provided a lively recap in his Oracle OpenWorld 2007 keynote.
SVP Andy Mendelsohn at Oracle OpenWorld
Oracle Database 11g, he summarized, is a response to Oracle customer's often-conflicting pressures to keep pace with endless change, wrestle down IT costs, and achieve 24/7 system availability.
"How can we keep changing but still give total availability?" Mendelsohn asked. His answer was the series of innovations in Oracle Database 11g, which he said helps organizations meet these top business challenges.
Coping with Change
The fast pace of change is reflected in the explosion of data, both in terms of amounts and new kinds of information. Companies are seeing database size triple every three years, fueled in part by increasing regulatory compliance demands, Mendelsohn said.
To help organizations cope, Oracle Database 11g provides native support for radio-frequency identification (RFID), medical imaging, and 3-D spatial data, and extends Oracle Database 10g's support for binary XML format.
When it comes time to test new capabilities that address changing business conditions, IT managers often spend months trying to replicate their production environments, Mendelsohn said. With Oracle Database 11g's Real Application Testing, you can capture and replay workloads and use a SQL performance analyzer to help test changes against real-life conditions and fine-tune changes before they go live—in some cases, in under two weeks. "Oracle Real Application Testing is revolutionary; there's nothing like it out there," Mendelsohn added.
Lowering IT Costs
Oracle Database 11g also offers new techniques for partitioning and compression, which in addition to boosting performance helps organizations lower IT costs. New compression capabilities save as much as 75 percent in storage space by packing data two to four times more tightly, Mendelsohn said, which can control costs by reducing the need for as much as US$1 million worth of storage resources to about US$60,000.
Further cost reductions are possible as well, thanks to Oracle Database 11g's information lifecycle management (ILM) capabilities, which include partitioning data into multiple storage tiers and appropriately priced storage technologies. Unlike with other ILM implementations, with Oracle Database 11g "you're not moving data out of the database—the data is still active and online," Mendelsohn explained.
The new database helps cut costs further with new automated memory management and SQL tuning capabilities that help organizations achieve faster performance using low-cost servers, Mendelsohn said.
Continuous Availability
To achieve reliable, 24/7 availability, Oracle Database 11g offers the Active Data Guard option, a tool for creating real-time replicas of the production database. With Active Data Guard, organizations can offload certain tasks from a production database to synchronized standby read-only databases that receive continuous updates from the production database.
Organizations can also use Active Data Guard to perform fast incremental backups to implement high-availability and disaster-recovery strategies. In addition, Active Data Guard replaces duplicate, standby databases that usually lie idle.
To learn more about Oracle Database 11g, watch Mendelsohn's keynote or visit oracle.com/database.
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