As Published In July/August 2005

Oracle Fusion Middleware Consolidates World-Class Products

Oracle has consolidated its world-class, standards-based middleware products into an offering called Oracle Fusion Middleware, including Oracle Application Server, Oracle Development Tools, Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Data Hubs, and more.

"Oracle Fusion Middleware brings greater agility, better decision-making, and reduced costs and risk to today's disparate enterprises," says Brian Dayton, Oracle principal product director. "It enables customers to exploit and reuse the resources and services they already have, while minimizing IT maintenance spending. Plus, products across the family enable our customers to streamline and optimize their business processes, know that they're working with the most current and accurate information, and ensure compliance with internal or external mandates."

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a family of closely related products that are often deployed and used in conjunction with one another. "The products are standards-based, engineered to work together, and have a reputation among customers, partners, and independent product reviewers for interoperability. We're offering best-of-breed functionality and the flexibility and choice to buy individual products or solutions within the family," adds Dayton.

Oracle Database Increases Market Share to 41.3 Percent

According to the IDC report "Worldwide RDBMS 2004 Vendor Shares: Preliminary Results for the Top 5 Vendors Show a Solid Boost" (March 2005, IDC #32969), Oracle continues to be the overall leader in the worldwide relational and object-relational database management systems software market.

IDC reports strong annual growth, as Oracle Database grew 14.5 percent year over year, increasing its market-share lead to 41.3 percent. Oracle outpaced the overall worldwide market for RDBMS software, which grew 11.6 percent.

"The numbers clearly indicate that Oracle made impressive gains in 2004 and widened the gap between itself and the nearest competitor," says Robert Shimp, Oracle vice president of technology marketing. "The growth is attributable to several factors, including the availability of Oracle Database 10g, the success of Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One, and the overall acceptance and adoption of our grid computing strategy by customers and partners."

Oracle Database Now Certified on Microsoft Windows x64

Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server, and Oracle Collaboration Suite products are now certified on Microsoft Windows x64, a platform that offers a significant performance boost for organizations running Oracle on Windows. The certification announcement was made recently at WinHEC 2005, Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle.

"With the availability of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition, customers can now use Oracle Database products in 32-bit mode running on the 64-bit operating system," explains Prem Kumar, Oracle vice president, Server Technologies. "There's also a developer preview of the database in native 64-bit Windows available from the Oracle Technology Network."

Kumar explains that DBAs can either run in 32-bit mode or download the preview for native 64-bit mode—either results in performance improvements—and that Oracle Database is certified for both the AMD64 and Intel EM64T platforms.

Oracle Announces Linux Test Lab

Oracle has announced the creation of a dedicated Linux Test Lab, providing a rigorous test environment to further the quality, stability, and supportability of the operating system. By bringing Linux testing in-house, Oracle assures customers that Linux will be finely tuned and dependable.

Addressing concerns about the reliability, support, and integration of Linux, Oracle has dedicated significant resources—staff as well as hardware—to the new test center. With hardware and storage from many leading vendors, Oracle will ensure that Linux goes through the same scrutiny as Oracle's own products. Oracle will test the Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux operating systems as well as the mainline Linux kernel, using real-world workloads.

"This test lab will help take Linux to the next level, ensuring that the operating system is as secure and stable as possible," says Wim Coekaerts, Oracle director of Linux engineering.

Oracle Releases Oracle Analytic Workspace Manager 10g

With the release of Oracle Analytic Workspace Manager 10g (Release 10.1.0.4), the task of defining and implementing dimensional models is easier for DBAs and data warehouse designers. Oracle Analytic Workspace Manager, a graphical administrative tool, manages the physical implementation of an analytic workspace throughout its lifecycle, allowing users to focus on the data model and on the process of embellishing the model with rich calculations.

"Only Oracle delivers a complete, preintegrated technology solution to reduce the cost and complexity of building and deploying enterprise business intelligence, and Oracle Analytic Workspace Manager 10g is a key part of this solution," says Anthony Waite, Oracle product manager. "Analytic Workspace Manager is ideal for OLAP specialists who need to work interactively and directly with the dimensional model in analytic workspaces—typically the case during prototyping and application development—and with departmental implementations."

Oracle Analytic Workspace Manager is designed for a wide range of users, including power users, departmental or enterprise DBAs, and application developers. "With a focus on ease of use, Oracle Analytic Workspace Manager is a powerful tool for specifying performance optimizations found in Oracle OLAP 10g—such as compression, partitioning, and aggregations—as part of the dimensional model," adds Waite.

Oracle Real Application Clusters Runs on Mac OS X

The Puget Sound Oracle Users Group (PSOUG), based in Washington state, has publicly demonstrated Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) running on Mac OS X, the UNIX-based 64-bit operating system from Apple. Built, configured, and run by PSOUG's Kent Stroker and Daniel Morgan, the "RAC on Mac" system adds another chapter to the Oracle/Mac OS X story, as Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Client 10g, and Oracle JDeveloper 10g are all fully certified on Mac OS X.

"The combination of low cost and superior features and performance makes Apple's hardware fully compatible with Oracle's Resilient Low-Cost Storage Initiative," says Morgan. "We haven't done any formal benchmarking yet, but these machines are just cookin'."

Stroker and Morgan's "RAC on Mac" system includes an Apple Xserve RAID (5.6TB) configured with both RAW and ASM partitions, a QLogic SANbox 5200 fabric switch, two dual-Xserve G5s, and a NetApp FAS270 NFS. Stroker and Morgan have configured three instances as follows: Xserver RAID: RAID 0+1 RAW partitions; Xserver RAID: RAID 5 ASM across six LUNs; and NetApp NAS. "Put together two G5s, an X RAID, and the QLogic fabric switch, and for less than $35,000, you can have a four-processor, 64-bit, two-node RAC cluster with 5.6TB," adds Stroker. "And they all play very well together."

Quocirca Releases Oracle Grid Index Data

Web Locator Oracle Fusion Middleware Oracle Database Market Share Oracle on Windows x64 Oracle's Dedicated Linux Test Lab Oracle Analytic Workspace Manager 10g Oracle 10g on Mac OS X Oracle Grid Index

Quocirca, a business and IT analysis firm, has released the Oracle Grid Index, which measures global adoption of grid computing technologies. The index shows an overall score for businesses across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific of 4.41 (on a scale of 0 to 10) and is a gauge of attitudes about, and adoption of, grid computing.

"Visionaries and early adopters of grid computing are already enjoying increased efficiencies in their core business systems," says Oracle President Charles Phillips. "The next stage is for this technology to enter the mainstream. Oracle's grid computing solution leads the industry in terms of its sheer practicality, and we are working with key partners to make it even more compelling."

Quocirca's findings are based on interviews with nearly 1,400 senior IT influencers and decision-makers. The index shows that North American businesses are adopting grid-related technologies to support mission-critical business systems, call center applications, and online transaction processing systems, among others. More than 50 percent of those surveyed acknowledged blade servers as a key technology they will deploy during the next 12 months, and more than 30 percent will use or deploy blade servers within their IT infrastructure in that time frame.

A large proportion of the knowledge leaders surveyed—86 percent—see the implementation of service-oriented architecture (SOA) by key packaged-application vendors as being of significant benefit from an interfacing and integration perspective. More than 90 percent of companies that are committed to grid computing are either currently using SOA methodology to develop new applications or will be during 2005.

Did You Know? Most Organizations Customize Business Intelligence Apps Organizations prefer to purchase analytic applications and tailor them to their specific business requirements, rather than exclusively build or buy them. They also customize, on average, 33 percent of a purchased BI tool, including look-and-feel, screens and layouts, calculations, and report navigation. Source: The Data Warehousing Institute XQuery Adoption Rate Rising Among XML Developers More than half of XML developers—52 percent—started working with XQuery in the 12 months ending in March 2005, and another 33 percent have plans to start using XQuery this year. These figures are based on a survey of 550 software professionals in 48 countries. Source: DataDirect's 2005 XQuery Industry Study Item-Level RFID Benefits the Retail Supply Chain Item-level RFID technology, when used in managing retail inventory, delivers an 800 percent improvement in employee productivity and a 50 to 60 percent reduction in out-of-stock items. Source: R4 Global Solutions Most IT Departments Disappoint Business Leaders Ninety-five percent of information technology departments in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. are not delivering some of their projects on time or to the full satisfaction of business executives. The top three reasons projects fail are unrealistic time frames (68 percent), lack of staff (64 percent), and poorly defined project scope (62 percent). Surveyed companies could select more than one reason for failure. Source: Info-Tech Research Group's IT Priorities 2005 Report