As Published In January/February 2005

Oracle Database 10g Release 2
By Rich Schwerin

Significant new backup, security, and XMLQuery enhancements in latest database release

Oracle has announced the newest version of Oracle Database 10g, Release 2, which provides significant new features and enhancements in many areas, including backup, security, and XMLQuery (XQuery).

"Oracle Database 10g Release 2 delivers a high-quality, extremely reliable platform for all customers' data-management needs," says Mark Townsend, Oracle's senior director of database product management. "With Oracle Database 10g Release 2, we've also significantly improved and enhanced backup and security, delivering even higher quality of service. In addition, the inclusion of key new technologies such as XMLQuery means that our customers can continue to take advantage of innovative new capabilities in a well-proven environment."

Oracle Backup and Recovery

"Recovery Manager, Flashback, and Oracle Data Guard have been enhanced to automate operations, avoid downtime, and protect and recover data at speeds our competitors can only dream about," says Ron Weiss, Oracle director of product management for high availability.

A new Oracle Backup tape-management system delivers reliable database and file-system backup to tape, with support for major tape drives and libraries in SAN, Gigabit Ethernet, and SCSI environments using standard tape formats. Fully integrated with Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN), Oracle Backup offers an intuitive browser interface, uniform command-line interface, and integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager for scheduling, media management, dynamic device sharing, and more.

"Oracle Data Guard provides unparalleled levels of data availability, data protection, and data recovery," adds Weiss. "Data Guard is perfect for high-availability environments, with improved network-transmission performance and fine-grained disaster-recovery monitoring."

The Cross-Platform Transportable Tablespace feature lets customers quickly move data from one database to another across different hardware platforms.

Oracle Transparent Data Encryption

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 introduces Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). For many years, Oracle Database Enterprise Edition has provided a comprehensive package for encrypting data, but the one component Oracle didn't provide was a built-in key-management solution, which is where TDE comes in. "TDE allows customers to encrypt sensitive data in columns without having to manage the encryption key, which is important to customers addressing regulatory-compliance issues," says Paul Needham, Oracle director of product management for database security. "Oracle eliminates the need for views to decrypt data, because the data is transparently decrypted once a user has passed necessary access-control checks."

Oracle XQuery

"Oracle is the first commercial relational-database vendor to support both native XML and native XQuery support, once again leading the way," says Sandeepan Banerjee, Oracle director of product management for objects and extensibility. "With XQuery support, customers will maintain all the benefits of the Oracle Database while storing or representing data in XML."

Next Steps LEARN more about Oracle Database 10g Release 2

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 includes built-in support for two new extension functions: XMLQuery and XMLTABLE. If, for example, customers are dealing with XML data and running XQuery queries, they can apply those queries directly to their Oracle Database and have them execute natively, resulting in extremely high performance.

"If data is stored and/or represented as XML, customers can now perform much more powerful XML queries than they could with Xpath," explains Banerjee. "This allows arbitrarily complex queries on data, without the need to analyze it, shred it, and convert it to some other format first."

"These and other new features make Oracle Database 10g Release 2 the most powerful and reliable commercial database available today, the easiest one to manage, and the only one with native XML and XQuery support," concludes Townsend.