Inside Oracle Database 11g
Continued
PROFIT: What is Oracle doing to help business leaders analyze information and make better decisions?
MENDELSOHN: On the business intelligence front, we're giving customers better insight into all kinds of information: ERP [enterprise resource planning] data, spatial data, Web content, XML data, Office documents, you name it. We have a technology called cube-organized materialized views that speeds up decision-support queries and makes it easier to analyze information. In the past, these views had to be created in advance, based on your knowledge of the kinds of questions you thought people would ask. That often meant creating hundreds of views to cover all possible scenarios. Now you can replace all those materialized views with one OLAP [online analytical processing] cube, which yields much faster results.
We also released Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, which makes it easier to find information in Oracle E-Business Suite and other applications. Let's say you want to find a job offer you posted. With Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, you can type in "job offer for John Smith" and it will retrieve the information in the context of the application you are working in.
PROFIT: How does Oracle Database 11g simplify security and compliance efforts?
MENDELSOHN: We have a feature called transparent data encryption that makes it easy to encrypt personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers. We've enhanced that technology with support for more datatypes, as well as for large objects and unstructured information. We also added tablespace encryption so you can encrypt entire subsets of database information and keep that data secure.
We created Oracle Database Vault to help companies deal with insider threats. For example, you can set privileges so a certain administrator can perform backups but not see any information, or so an HR administrator can see HR information but not financial data. Also, we offer Oracle Audit Vault to enforce security validation policies. Let's say an auditor comes into your IT shop to ensure you are correctly protecting your information. You might have hundreds or even thousands of databases, so manually going through the audit trail is virtually impossible. Oracle Audit Vault can go into all these databases, gather the auditing information, and consolidate it into a data warehouse. Then you can run standard queries to quickly discover violations of your security policies.
PROFIT: How does Oracle Database 11g help with business continuity?
MENDELSOHN: Many companies have created standby databases for disaster recovery purposes, which are essentially duplicates of their production databases. This is expensive, since the standby databases aren't used unless there is a mishap or disaster. With Oracle Database 11g, you can offload work to these standby databases, like your query workload and your backup workload, so you get daily use of these standby databases.
Burlington Coat Factory uses Oracle Data Guard to keep information in sync between its two data centers. Mike Prince, Burlington's CTO, told attendees at Oracle OpenWorld how his organization adopted an Oracle grid to devise a simple yet powerful IT architecture with fewer moving parts. They have two grids running different production systems, and Oracle Data Guard ensures that all updates are carried out on both grids, providing complete protection from site failure or disaster.
PROFIT: What is motivating Oracle Applications customers to adopt Oracle Database 11g?
MENDELSOHN: We've simplified the upgrade process. We're constantly testing and refining the software to make sure it supports our ERP and CRM [customer relationship management] applications in an optimum fashion. Oracle's own experience is a great proof point. We run our entire business on Oracle Applications and Oracle Database in a grid environment. We're adopting Oracle Database 11g because we know it can manage vast quantities of structured and unstructured data in a highly efficient manner, and because it positions us to deal with change in a stable, confident way.
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Putting Oracle Database 11g to Work
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David Baum is a technology and business writer who writes frequently for
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