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FEATURE
Industrial-Strength Feedback
By David Baum
Oracle Rises to the Needs of Industry with Oracle Database 10g
Oracle's core technology is generally considered to be horizontal in nature, meaning it applies equally well to a broad scope of business requirements. Yet many of the enhancements found in Oracle Database 10g were developed with specific industries in mind. In some cases, new capabilities were developed in response to trends and requests among specific sets of customers, such as those in government, retail, life sciences, financial services, and other domains.
"Our greatest source of information is the customer base," says Tom Madigan, a vice president in Oracle's North American Industries Business Unit, a group within Oracle that works with customers in high tech, telecommunications, professional services, financial services, automotive, retail, consumer packaged goods, life sciences, and industrial manufacturing. "By working with customers to better understand their needs, we're able to craft products and develop strategies that keep Oracle technology in line with real needs in the business world."
Madigan and team meet with customers to exchange ideas about what's new within a particular industry. "We'll talk about trends in the marketplace and address product limitations that would inhibit the customer from moving forward," he says. "Once we identify these issues at the business level, we map them back to the technology level to help customers optimize their investments and to improve the product set."
Lessons in Analysis
For example, following nearly two decades of designing, developing, and deploying data warehouses, some Oracle customers began reporting that they were tired of supporting two different types of database environments—one for transaction processing and operational data, and another for data mining, reporting, and analytical activities. Beginning with Oracle9i Database and becoming more refined in Oracle Database 10g, these customers can create a homogeneous database environment with embedded business intelligence (BI) capabilities to streamline data mining, data preprocessing, and hypotheses testing.
These architectural changes will benefit many Oracle customers, particularly in the life sciences industry, where researchers confront a heterogeneous data-rich environment in which it's becoming progressively more difficult to perform analysis. Life sciences customers were among the first to admit that the split between transactional and analytic databases was beginning to hamper their research activities. "As the volume of data continues to go up, it's no longer feasible for these customers to maintain a separate data warehouse for analysis," says Harry Ghuman, a vice president in Oracle's North American Industries Business Unit.
"With Oracle Database 10g, institutions can build business rules and intelligence right into the database to analyze information," Ghuman says. "It's much less expensive, and will eliminate the lag time between when a data point gets generated and when an event becomes known to act on."
Current models for statistical analysis are not scalable or sustainable, but Ghuman and his colleagues believe the technology is starting to catch up with customer needs. "Bioinformatics is very expensive, partly because of the intensive data-analysis activities involved," says Vijay Pillai, director of life sciences programs at Oracle. "In the past, life sciences customers had to pull information out of Oracle Database and put it into a third-party format just to run simple statistical analysis, and later, load the results back into Oracle Database to run further data-mining algorithms. With Oracle Database 10g, they can perform the statistical analysis and run the data-mining predictive algorithms all within one integrated, scalable environment."
Eventually, Pillai adds, the industry wants to leverage the fruits of the genomic revolution so that when something like the SARS epidemic comes along researchers can immediately identify differences among genetic strains along with the variation in clinical data. "Right now there's a lot of guesswork, but the long-term solution is to be able to quickly analyze the information to determine which drugs to use to combat the various mutations of a virus, understanding the phenotypic differences in individuals," he says. "In many cases, success comes down to how fast you can analyze the information."
Oracle Database 10g improvements designed especially for bioinformatics customers include native support of new DOUBLE and FLOAT datatypes, resulting in improved performance for applications with lots of numeric computations. Built-in statistical functions support ANOVA analysis, distribution fitting, hypothesis testing, and multiple regression. For researchers, text-mining capabilities support document clustering and classification using Support-Vector Machine algorithms. In addition, new BLAST similarity searches are ideal for analyzing genetic data right inside the database, avoiding the need to create redundant data sets.
"These statistical capabilities will be tremendously helpful to the life sciences and pharmaceuticals industries," says Ghuman. "A technology that can streamline drug discovery and testing has far-reaching implications."
Ripple Effect
Product enhancements designed for one industry often benefit many others. For example, native analytic capabilities designed for life sciences customers are extremely useful for financial services and telecommunications companies as well. "Customer retention is a big issue for banks and telcos, as market dynamics force them to rethink how they address individual consumers, how they predict customer loyalty, and how they react to changes in the transaction record," Madigan explains. "Thanks to our new analytical and statistical capabilities, telcos and financial services companies can more quickly answer these questions."
Rapid modeling and analysis of Oracle data has already proven to be a boon to financial services companies. According to Anthony Fernicola, group vice president of Oracle Financial Services, Oracle's increased momentum in this sector is indicative of its understanding of industry issues and its ability to help financial services companies improve reporting and analysis processes. He values the input Oracle solicits from its customer advisory boards, where financial organizations supply targeted feedback on new software technology, such as Oracle Database 10g.
Many industries struggle with these same types of data-analysis issues. Often, product offerings are based
on a rapid market-testing cycle that involves formulating a hypothesis, designing a test to validate the hypothesis, analyzing historical data, and then conducting live market results. "The volume of transactions that is being processed in financial services, in travel/transportation,
in retail, in telecommunications, is huge," Ghuman says.
In some industries, technical breakthroughs are driving the need for ultralarge databases, such as the emergence of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in the retail sector. These tiny computer chips, which can be affixed to everything from clothing to coffee pots, will allow retailers to track the entire lifecycle of an item. Each tag can store about 2 kilobytes of information, such as how to care for the item, details about its supply chain history, and even data about the customer who purchased it. By communicating with e-business systems, RFID tags will soon enable modern business practices like self-checkout and instant inventory optimization. Eyeing these potential benefits, retail giant Wal-Mart recently announced to its top 100 suppliers that by 2005 it would be attaching RFID tags to every item in its stores (E-Business News, June 5, 2003).
"Retailers have always wanted to do this, but until now they have been limited by technology," says Ghuman. "With the cost of the RFID tags coming down and with Oracle Database 10g, our ability to manipulate large amounts of data and analyze it natively in the database is finally making it feasible."
Always On
Gathering, storing, and managing all this data will place high demands upon the underlying database infrastructure. A single datafile in an Oracle9i Database is limited to between 64 and 128 gigabytes. In Oracle Database 10g, a single datafile can contain 8 exabytes (about 8 million terabytes). "One of the themes of Oracle Database 10g is 'two times the speed, ten times the size,'" says Tim Hoechst, senior vice president of technology for Oracle's Government, Education, and Healthcare (GEH) Division. "We've introduced a raft of management capabilities that significantly reduce the cost of deploying and maintaining Oracle-based solutions."
Hoechst and his team are focused on two things: ensuring that Oracle's products meet the specific needs of government customers, and maintaining expertise inside Oracle to help customers put the technology to good use. He believes Oracle Database 10g makes it easier to move large databases from platform to platform. With Oracle Database 10g, this movement will be a simple operation, thanks to the new cross-platform transportable tablespace facility.
Hoechst says many aspects of the Oracle Database 10g architecture were driven by the needs of large federal customers. "Our government customers have unique needs, and they're big users of our core technology," he says. "Whether it's figuring out new ways to deliver information to a soldier's helmet or improving the privacy of healthcare data, Oracle continually strives to understand the real needs of these communities. These are large organizations with large information problems."
According to Hoechst, Oracle's government customers drive technical innovation that benefits the private sector as well. For example, data security, privacy, and business continuity are high priorities for this sector, as are high availability and disaster recovery. "Today's law enforcement officials must analyze vast volumes of unstructured textual data to cull information about counter-terrorism, for example, and several new Oracle Database 10g capabilities are driven by those requirements," says Hoechst.
For instance, Oracle Text's classification and link analysis capabilities are in great demand from federal law enforcement agencies. "These organizations have loads of structured and unstructured text, making our new Oracle Text classification and link analysis capabilities particularly relevant," says Tom Kyte, vice president of core technologies in the Oracle GEH Division.
According to Kyte, the Oracle Database 10g Query Log Analysis and the Progressive Text Query template allow multiple queries to be modified on the fly, based on the results of earlier queries. The link analysis algorithm helps rank the results of searches through Web pages and content, while document clustering procedures make it easier to group documents based on similar content.
Invaluable to law enforcement agencies, these capabilities are useful to corporate customers as well. A vast amount of the information inside of enterprises takes the form of unstructured content such as e-mail messages, spreadsheets, textual documents, and even voice-mail messages. "In financial services, manufacturing, education, and other industries, this unstructured information includes important intellectual capital, yet until now it has been difficult to store, manage, or search the information," Kyte points out. "Oracle Database 10g helps pull that unstructured information into a useful database format, while the Oracle Files component of Oracle Collaboration Suite supplies numerous options for storing, searching, and managing it."
Media and entertainment companies using Oracle Database 10g will enjoy standard access to multimedia data via the SQL Multimedia Standard and Java Advanced Imaging capabilities. New audio and video media formats are also supported, including MPEG4, MPEG2, and WMF, with the automatic recognition and extraction of all metadata associated with these formats. Finally, the 4-gigabyte restriction on LOBs stored in the database is raised to between 8 and 128 terabytes, making it easier to store and manage large multimedia files.
Information Exchange
Many customers will benefit from the new Web services framework of Oracle Database 10g, which allows middle tier and desktop applications to search, retrieve, and extract business data through standard Web services mechanisms. This standard database functionality will streamline information sharing among healthcare organizations, particularly in response to new standards mandated by the United States Health Information Portability and Protection Act (HIPPA).
Among other things, HIPPA enforces common standards for exchanging information among healthcare providers, payers, and intermediaries. HIPPA compliance can be complicated, since it often means integrating legacy systems across heterogeneous platforms, databases, and transaction systems. Web services play a key role in streamlining the interconnections among systems. HIPPA is prevalent within the U.S. healthcare industry, while Health Level 7 (HL7) dominates on the international scene.
Oracle Database 10g Web services will also be a boon to state, local, and federal agencies, all of which are scrambling to respond to the Federal Enterprise Architecture created by the United States Office of Management and Budget.
"The federal government is creating a huge framework for federal agencies to share information, and there's a large Web services dimension to the architecture," Hoechst says. "Oracle Database 10g makes Web services a database feature, meaning any SQL query or Java routine can be called as a Web service. And because Web services can be treated as database tables, other Web services can query information from those tables as well."
Getting Vertical
Oracle continues to tailor its core software assets to a wide variety of industry needs. Madigan says the drive for improvement is a result of Oracle's interest in and interaction with customers from a broad spectrum of industries. "Over time we start to see parallels from customer A to customer B, from industry A to industry B, and this is shared with our development organization," he concludes. "In the case of Oracle Database 10g, listening to our customers has led to groundbreaking advancements in scalability, availability, functionality, cost, and performance."
David Baum (david@dbaumcomm.com) is an independent writer who frequently covers business and technology topics.
| Feature | Originally Designed For | Current Uses |
| Native support of new DOUBLE and FLOAT | Life sciences customers | Data warehousing, analytics
datatypes |
| Embedded business intelligence and statistical analysis capabilities | Retail, telecom, life sciences, and financial services customers | Data consolidation, rapid decision making |
| Ultralarge databases | Life sciences and government customers | Genomic databases and security |
| Cross-platform transportable tablespace facility; Enhanced Data Guard infrastructure | Government, life sciences, and financial services customers | Disaster recovery, high-availability computing |
| Oracle Text's classification and link analysis | Law enforcement customers | Searching and sorting unstructured data |
| Link analysis algorithm, document clustering | Corporate customers | Comprehensive Web searches |
SQL Multimedia Standard and Java
Advanced Imaging capabilities | Media and entertainment and corporate customers | Storage and manipulation of multimedia files |
| Standard support for MPEG4, MPEG2, and WMF | Media and entertainment customers | Storage and manipulation of multimedia files |
| Advanced Web services framework | Healthcare and government customers | Application integration and data exchange |
| Network technology | Dynamic navigational systems using GPS | Metabolic pathways in life sciences
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