As Published In November/December 2004

Oracle and Microsoft Have History
By Jeff Spicer

Growing partnership extends benefits of Oracle products to all enterprises, particularly small ones.

Casual technology observers might have raised an eyebrow regarding Oracle's announcement earlier this year of its participation as a premier-level partner in the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner program, given the frequently less-than-positive press coverage of the two companies' relationship. Participation by Oracle makes sense, however, because it benefits Oracle, Microsoft, and their customers. As a program member, Oracle will provide even tighter integration between Oracle Database and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003—a big win for developers building Oracle applications on the Microsoft Windows platform.

Actually, Oracle and Microsoft's history of cooperation began with Oracle's support for the Microsoft platform nearly 20 years ago. Since 1985 Oracle has helped its customers build databases on Microsoft platforms, and in 1993 Oracle became the first company to release a relational database for the Windows NT operating system. The NT release was unique, in that Oracle reengineered its database to take advantage of NT architecture and features.

Two years after porting its database to Windows NT, Oracle made all of its development tools, object technology, and modeling and analysis tools available on NT. Recognizing that Microsoft NT was gaining popularity, Oracle naturally wanted to extend the availability of its products to NT customers, from small businesses to large enterprises.

The Oracle database on Windows, having continued to evolve, now takes advantage of the most-advanced Windows services. Besides a thread-based architecture, operation as a Windows service, and VLM support, Oracle Database 10g for Windows includes support for the Itanium-based 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003, a performance boost for memory-intensive instances of 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Server 2003, support for fibers (the new level of execution that is more granular than threads), automatic detection of Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) hardware, and improved manageability of Oracle Real Application Clusters on Windows. Although many of these features are geared primarily to larger enterprises, Oracle Database is also increasingly the choice for small to medium organizations, because it sets the standard for performance, reliability, scalability, and security on Windows and other popular operating systems, including Linux.

Next Steps VISIT the Windows Technology Center on OTN LEARN more about Oracle Database Standard Edition One SEE the Dell Oracle Database Standard Edition One offering

Beyond recent technical enhancements, of most interest to small and medium businesses are the release of Oracle Database Standard Edition One—a version of Oracle Database priced at US$149 per user (minimum five users)—and the announcement of a preinstalled version of Oracle Database Standard Edition One and Windows on Dell's new PowerEdge 2850 server. Customers can purchase this package by calling Dell or visiting the Dell Web site. For small businesses, price and ease of purchase are only part of the buying decision—ease of deployment and administration are also key, hence Oracle Database Standard Edition One is simple to install and manage.

Natively leveraging Windows and offering an inexpensive database bundled with Windows are just two of the ways Oracle supports Microsoft (and Microsoft-based customers). Oracle also supports the Microsoft community with:

• The release of Oracle Application Server Standard Edition One for Windows and Linux: Like its database counterpart, this version of the application server is packaged for one- or two-processor systems running Windows or Linux.
• Commitment to .NET: The .NET development platform is widely used by developers, so Oracle offers Oracle Data Provider for .NET for high-performance access to its database from .NET.
• Integration with Visual Studio .NET: Oracle is helping make Microsoft Visual Studio .NET developers more productive when developing against the Oracle database.
• Resources on Oracle Technology Network (OTN): Consult the resources on OTN for Windows and .NET developers and for businesses running Microsoft and Oracle products together.

Jeff Spicer, Editor in Chief
jeff.spicer@oracle.com