As Published In January/February 2005

Stand-alone Oracle Application Server Components Now Available

Oracle has broken out several of the components of Oracle Application Server 10g Enterprise Edition and is now offering them as stand-alone products. The new offerings include Oracle Integration, Oracle Portal, Oracle Forms, Oracle Business Intelligence, and Oracle Identity Management.

"The new packages are designed to provide additional flexibility to customers who want to buy specific components of the Oracle Application Server product family," says Thomas Kurian, senior vice president, Oracle Application Server.

The per-processor prices are: Oracle Portal: US$10,000 and US$200 per named user; Oracle Identity Management: US$15,000 and US$300 per named user; and Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Forms, and Oracle Integration: US$20,000 each and US$400 per named user. In addition, Oracle BPEL Process Manager is available as a stand-alone product for US$40,000 per processor and US$800 per named user.

Beta Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET Available

Oracle has made available a beta release of the tool set that integrates Oracle Developer Tools with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005.

The tool set helps streamline the development of Oracle database applications on Windows by enabling developers to browse and modify their Oracle schemas, leverage powerful wizards and designers, automatically generate code, and view and edit Oracle data. These and other features, including stored procedure editing with Intellisense (a Visual Studio coding aid), syntax coloring, and an integrated help system, are designed to speed development and make it easy to learn how to develop Oracle applications for Windows.

"With Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET, Windows developers can harness the power of Oracle Database and leverage their existing Visual Studio .NET experience. They can remain in the Visual Studio environment throughout a project's lifecycle, minimizing the need for external tools," says Christian Shay, principal product manager for Windows development at Oracle.

In May 2004, Oracle joined Microsoft's Visual Studio Industry Partner program as a premier-level partner to provide integration between Oracle Database and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, with future support for Visual Studio 2005. A production release of the tool set is slated for the first quarter of 2005.

New Oracle Data Provider for .Net

Oracle recently released Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) 10g Release 10.1.0.3, which includes ease-of-use and performance tuning features that make developing .NET applications faster and more productive with Oracle.

"ODP.NET makes using Oracle from .NET more flexible, faster, and more stable," says Alex Keh, Oracle principal product manager. "And with new statement caching, command cancellation, and DeriveParameters features available in ODP.NET, it's never been easier for developers to take advantage of advanced Oracle Database functionality."

ODP.NET 10g gives developers optimized data access to Oracle Database from a .NET environment, so they can take advantage of advanced functionality, including Oracle Real Application Clusters, XML DB, advanced security, and more. The data provider can be used from any .NET language, including C# and Visual BASIC .NET. Designed for scalable enterprise Windows solutions, ODP.NET provides support for Unicode and local and distributed transactions. (Distributed transactions are supported using the Oracle Services for MTS.)

Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g previews at openworld

At its annual conference, Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle announced new features and functionality of the upcoming release of its collaboration product, Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g. The new release features numerous enhancements including expanded capabilities in real-time collaboration and content management.

In addition to the suite's current Web conferencing capabilities, real-time collaboration features include instant messaging, presence, and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) support. Oracle Messenger, Oracle's foray into the instant messaging space, allows users to launch a Web conference or chat session directly from the messaging window. Oracle also takes the presence function beyond showing whether members of a user's contact list are available. A software development kit for Oracle Collaboration Suite enables developers to build functionality that shows presence information and lets a user launch an instant message or a Web conference directly from within a business application.

Oracle has also beefed up the content management capabilities in Oracle Collaboration Suite. Enhancements to the Oracle Files component include APIs that allow consistent policy enforcement across an enterprise as well the ability to intelligently surface documents within business or portal applications. The new release will also provide better integration with Microsoft Windows. Enhancements to Oracle's content management capabilities are in line with stricter government regulations and corporate mandates. According to the September 2004 META Group report, Document Management: Massive Opportunity for the Mass Market, regulatory compliance will drive increased content management adoption over the next three years, and Oracle is well positioned to deliver effective, affordabel, easy-to-use content management solutions.

Oracle Sets Trio of TPC-H Benchmark Records

Oracle has achieved simultaneous world-record performances on three of the largest TPC-H scale factors: 1, 3, and 10 terabytes. It is the only vendor to accomplish this feat.

"No one can beat Oracle's performance," says MaryBeth Pierantoni, Oracle senior product manager. "As the leading database for data warehousing and business intelligence applications, only Oracle provides a single, integrated database engine for scalable, high-performance, complex analytics and data mining."

Oracle Database 10g set the TPC-H 1TB record on a Fujitsu Siemens PRIMEPOWER 2500. It set the TPC-H 3TB record on an HP Integrity Superdome Enterprise Server. Oracle Database 10g with Real Application Clusters achieved the TPC-H 10TB record on an HP Integrity Superdome Enterprise Server.*

"As the industry moves toward large, consolidated, multiterabyte data warehouses, these independent benchmarks prove that Oracle Database 10g is fastest at executing complex analytical queries, regardless of data warehouse size," says William Hardie, Oracle senior director of product marketing. "Oracle is the best way to create, manage, access, and analyze all data."

Study Says Oracle Database 10g Easier to Manage than DB2

An independent study from the Edison Group released in November 2004 shows significant manageability savings with Oracle Database 10g compared to IBM DB2 8.2. Edison's head-to-head product comparison examined the database administrative functions, focusing on the use of human resources, with the objective of revealing the comparative database administration costs of operating the two products.

Web Locator Oracle Application Server product editions Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET ODP.NET 10g release 10.1.0.3 Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g Oracle TPC-H Benchmark Records Oracle Database Manageability Oracle Support

Edison found that database administrators can perform typical administrative functions in nearly 46 percent less time when using Oracle Database 10g, compared to IBM DB2 8.2. Edison determined that Oracle Database 10g is less expensive to operate than IBM DB2 UDB in terms of comparative management costs for businesses with transactional, analytical, and data warehousing workloads that require DBA support. According to the report, businesses can realize potential savings of as much as $50,000 per DBA per year due to the increased management efficiency of Oracle Database 10g over IBM DB2 8.2.

According to the study, "Oracle Database 10g is a technically advanced, highly scalable RDBMS with built-in self-management features that make it easier to manage and more cost-effective than IBM DB2 8.2."

The Edison Group objectively measured (in quantitative and qualitative terms), the relative manageability of Oracle Database 10g and IBM DB2 8.2, projecting over the course of a year the expected savings in management costs due to the administrative efficiency of Oracle over IBM.

Oracle Support Services Recognized for Excellence

Oracle Support Services has received two 2004 Software Technical Assistance Recognition (STAR) Awards for excellence in customer support service from the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA), the leading industry organization for IT support professionals. The SSPA honored Oracle in its "Innovative Support" category, based on Oracle's delivery of top-quality support services, which utilize proactive diagnostic and resolution methodologies. Oracle also won the "WebStar" award for excellence in delivering technical support via the internet.

Did You Know? Web Services Infrastructure In Place, but Largely Unused Between 5 and 10 percent of Fortune 1000 companies use Web services, whereas 60 percent of computing infrastructure supports it. An estimated 65 percent of IT development budgets goes for systems integration. XML is widely used to enable system integration, rich content, and streamlined B2B communications; XML use has grown 160 percent in the last year (from a relatively small base). Source: Yankee Group Managed Security Services Grow Spending on managed security services (MSS) totaled US$925 million in 2004, growing 41.7 percent over costs in 2003. Regulatory compliance, cost and time savings, and an emphasis on core competencies are the primary reasons companies give for outsourcing security. Source: Frost & Sullivan Outsourced IT Continues to Grow in Manufacturing Manufacturing companies plan to increase spending on IT outsourcing by 9.3 percent in 2005. A quarter of IT work is outsourced in manufacturing, and 53 percent of manufacturing intends to increase outsourcing spending; 5 percent plans to decrease spending. Offshore outsourcing is growing twice as fast as overall outsourcing in manufacturing. Source: AMR Research

Sample Code: First and Last Days of Specified Month The following query can be created in a database as a view to help developers get start and end days for a specified month. -- Get first and last days for last and current month SELECT Trunc(Trunc(SYSDATE,'MONTH')-1,'MONTH') First_Day_Last_Month, Trunc(SYSDATE,'MONTH')-1/86400 Last_Day_Last_Month, Trunc(SYSDATE,'MONTH') First_Day_Cur_Month, LAST_DAY(Trunc(SYSDATE,'MONTH'))+1-1/86400 Last_Day_Cur_Month FROM dual ; -- Output ( rotated vertically for easy reading ) --------------------------------------------------- FIRST_DAY_LAST_MONTH 04/01/2004 12:00:00 AM LAST_DAY_LAST_MONTH 04/30/2004 11:59:59 PM FIRST_DAY_CUR_MONTH 05/01/2004 12:00:00 AM LAST_DAY_CUR_MONTH 05/31/2004 11:59:59 PM Galina Petrenko (galina.petrenko@towers.com) is a senior IT specialist with TPAS Systems Development, in Vorhees, New Jersey. Share Your Code Got good code? Submit it to OTN's code tip section. Submit code tips View code tips Find more code you can use