Oracle Database 11g
Continued
PROFIT: What's your favorite new feature in Oracle Database 11g?
NIEMIEC: I would love to tell you about my top 20 features, but let me just tell you about one. It's a feature that would allow you to capture and replay system workloads, and it might be the best thing planned for Oracle Database 11g. People are constantly making changes in their data centers: implementing migrations and upgrades and changing hardware, operating systems, and applications. They've needed a way to ensure consistent or better behavior when they make these changes. Oracle Database 11g's workload capture and replay feature would do this.
Workload capture and replay is planned to be a simple menu-driven way of capturing a system's workload over time and then replaying it precisely in the same manner as it was captured. You would be able to capture workload for a minute, an hour, or for several days so when you make changes in your system, you could test your real day-to-day application workloads against the new system. You would be able to make changes with confidence.
PROFIT: How will the new release affect Oracle Applications users?
NIEMIEC: Most of our work at TUSC is with Oracle Applications. I look at it this way: In the database world, Oracle has always been first. Now on the application side, I look at Oracle acquiring PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion, Retek, Siebel, and more. You're watching Oracle succeeding at the deepest levels at making its applications and database infrastructures work together for customers. I don't think they're going to be caught for 10 to 20 years on the business side. On the security side, they acquired Oblix—literally the best product out there for identity management.
PROFIT: Any other thoughts on Oracle's recent acquisition activities?
NIEMIEC: I've never seen Oracle caught from behind over the past 20 years, and right now I think they're extending their lead. Take a company like SAP: 67 percent of SAP runs on Oracle Database. They're not acquiring all the pieces that Oracle is acquiring. They're not acquiring the security capabilities. They're not acquiring all of the failover capabilities. They're not acquiring the disaster recovery technology. All these things make a customer's business stronger, and they're all beginning to come from Oracle. Oracle Database makes SAP a better product. Much of what makes SAP a viable business product is Oracle Database underneath the hood. With the capabilities that we expect to be available in Oracle Database 11g underlying all these critical business and technology functions, it is really overwhelming.
PROFIT: Any final thoughts on the technology underlying the database?
NIEMIEC: Oracle is really more than a database. It is much more of a platform. It's clustering technology, failover technology, disaster recovery technology; it has Grid Control to handle grid systems and manage service-oriented architecture, right out of the box. It has features to automatically tune the system and automatically send alerts. So it's self-healing and self-alerting. It's online for better availability. It's all those surrounding products that provide even greater benefits to Oracle users. And with Oracle Database 11g, you can expect to manage change like never before.
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Oracle Database 11g
Jeff Erickson is a senior editor with Oracle Publishing.
