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AT ORACLE: Briefs
Oracle Announces Four New Data Hubs
Oracle recently announced the next generation of Oracle data hubs, including four new products—Oracle Citizen Data Hub, Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub, Oracle Financial Services Accounting Hub, and Oracle Product Data Hub.
Like the Oracle Customer Data Hub, each hub is a fully integrated data management solution that centralizes and deduplicates data, continuously synchronizing it with all data sources, to deliver a single view of high-quality data. As new data comes in, reporting accuracy grows, analytics become more valuable, productivity increases, and day-to-day relationships improve. And because data hubs are based on open standards, they can be easily integrated with any third-party software, as well as with any module of Oracle E-Business Suite.
The new hubs, scheduled to be available in the first half of this year, include:
- Oracle Citizen Data Hub—Allows government agencies to create and manage a comprehensive, accurate citizen repository
- Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub—Streamlines time-critical parts of the period close and enables rapid access to key financial information, by automating the entire consolidation process
- Oracle Financial Services Accounting Hub—Enables financial institutions to address the complex demands of centralizing financial operational data, standardizing accounting and reporting policies, and accelerating regulatory disclosure and management reporting cycles
- Oracle Product Data Hub—Centralizes product information from disparate systems to create a single global catalog that serves as the master for all other systems, customers, and suppliers
Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 On the Way
Designing, building, securing, and backing up data stores takes considerable time and money, yet data quality is often an afterthought. But with Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2, information quality is paramount, according to Paul Narth, Oracle senior group manager.
"This release of Oracle Warehouse Builder will be the most significant to date," says Narth. "With more than a dozen major new features, Release 2 combines ETL, OLAP, data profiling, data mining, and real-time data warehousing technologies, enabling customers to transform raw data into quality information."
Narth adds that Oracle Warehouse Builder is the only enterprise business intelligence integration design tool that manages the full lifecycle of data and metadata for Oracle Database 10g, providing an easy-to-use graphical environment for rapidly designing, deploying, and managing business intelligence systems.
Working with SQL in Oracle HTML DB Gets Easier
Working with SQL and PL/SQL is about to get much easier, according to Oracle Senior Product Manager Sergio Leunissen, thanks to Project Columbus, code name for a new graphical user interface for the SQL Workshop component in Oracle HTML DB, which allows developers to build their application logic declaratively. "Routine tasks such as manipulating database objects or executing SQL and PL/SQL are performed quickly and with ease—and all you need is a browser," explains Leunissen.
Project Columbus makes development in Oracle Database more productive, says Leunissen. With it, Oracle developers regularly perform tasks such as browsing and creating database objects; viewing data; running SQL*Plus scripts, ad hoc SQL, and PL/SQL; and editing PL/SQL packages, procedures, and functions.
"With Project Columbus, Oracle developers are able to perform these tasks more quickly, through a rich and easy-to-use interface," says Leunissen. "Because Project Columbus is browser-based, developers can get started immediately without installing software on the client."
Watch for a beta version of Project Columbus this spring, with release set for mid-2005.
Oracle Announces Grid Control Release 2
New grid management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2—called Oracle Grid Control—offer automated software management and features that allow administrators to deploy systems more quickly and easily.
"The focus of grid management is to gain the highest quality of service for a wide variety of applications while delivering business services and lowering costs," says Jay Rossiter, Oracle vice president of system management products. "Grid computing promises to deliver advanced business agility and flexibility for organizations aligning IT to address core business needs."
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control automates four critical management activities: application service levels; deployment and configuration; enterprise administration, including provisioning and patch management; and heterogeneous extensibility and interoperability.
Oracle Grid Control now includes new service-level management functionality, which enables viewing of business services and service-level performance from a single screen, and a topology visualization function, which provides a visual representation of IT systems and services. There's also stronger support for heterogeneous systems, including IBM and BEA application servers, and Linux.
New Oracle Developer 10g Offers Enhances Developer Productivity
With its second release, Oracle JDeveloper 10g, now available in developer preview, offers many new productivity enhancements for developers. Such enhancements range from XML tools to comprehensive code refactoring, to a rich set of graphical user interface components that implement the JavaServer Faces standard. And even with all these new features, Oracle JDeveloper now has a smaller footprint.
"With full support for open standards development on numerous operating systems, Oracle JDeveloper 10g Release 2 provides complete development lifecycle support for Java developers creating J2EE applications and Web services," says Rick Schultz, Oracle vice president of application server marketing. "Oracle JDeveloper includes built-in features for optimizing the performance of Java applications while providing a single integrated development environment for Java, XML and PL/SQL, UML modeling, and J2EE Web services."
Oracle has also announced early availability of Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces. Based on the JavaServer Faces (JSR-127) standard, Oracle ADF Faces speeds application development, by providing a set of user interface components that can be easily customized and reused, ensuring a consistent look and feel while allowing developers to focus on simply designing the user interaction and application flow.
"Oracle JDeveloper provides developers with a comprehensive offering for all skill sets, with a J2EE development framework that allows newer Java developers to quickly become productive while minimizing tedious low-level coding for more-experienced developers," says Ted Farrell, Oracle chief architect for application development tools.
The Middleware Company finds Oracle Tools Developers Most Productive
A recent independent study from The Middleware Company found that Oracle tools are more productive in constructing service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications, versus competitive tools from BEA and IBM. In the study, published in November 2004, two developers were tasked with building the same SOA application with development tools from BEA, IBM, and Oracle. The developers implemented a productivity-oriented module of the SOA Blueprints specification—an expert-reviewed, multivendor initiative to define a set of standard applications.
Building the reference application took just 127 hours with Oracle tools, versus 164 hours with IBM and 184 hours with BEA. The study attributed Oracle's implementation speed to the Oracle Application Server TopLink 10g persistence layer. It also noted the advantage of Oracle JDeveloper's visual features for generating Web pages, which automated Struts configuration and provided data binding in user interface development.
The authors of the report also commended Oracle Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) Process Manager, stating, "The definite advantage is the standards-based BPEL Designer, which makes designing processes simple and yet portable to any BPEL-compliant server. The monitoring and auditing capabilities are exceptional. The orchestration was done fairly easily."
New Oracle Procurement Helps Automate Hiring
New contingent labor capabilities released in December 2004 in Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.10 help human resources organizations improve contingent worker recruiting and procurement processes. By eliminating redundant data entry and increasing the accuracy and speed of invoice reconciliation, Oracle Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) and Oracle Services Procurement provide executives with timely, accurate information about workforce spend and performance.
"Today, close management of contingent labor is a critical extension of workforce management best practices," says Joel Summers, senior vice president of Oracle HRMS development. "Oracle HRMS enables customers to maximize the benefits of an on-demand workforce while reducing the cost of doing so."
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Did You Know?
Certification Pays, but
Preparation Costs
IT workers with professional certifications averaged a 14.1 percent salary increase in 2004. Seventy-nine percent of certification survey respondents spent less than US$1,000 on materials to earn their primary certification, with 64.2 percent spending less than US$500. But 1.4 percent of respondents spent more than US$10,000 to certify themselves. On average, respondents spent US$1,039 on materials to get their primary certification. Some employers pay for certification preparation: 48 percent said their employers pay the entire tab, and 37.9 percent paid entirely for their own certifications.
Source: Certification Magazine
Software Development
Outsourced . . . to North America
North America is the most likely recipient of outsourced software development projects, garnering 40 percent of outsourced work. Twenty-four percent goes to Indian development shops, and 6 percent goes to European developers. More than half of enterprise companies outsource a portion of their software development, but less than 5 percent outsource the majority of it.
Source: Evans Data Corporation's Winter 2004 Enterprise Development Management Issues survey
Applications a Priority; Help Needed
Fifty-nine percent of enterprise IT decision-makers surveyed said deployment or upgrade of major packaged applications was their No. 1 priority for 2005, replacing security in 2004. Sixty-nine percent of these companies will purchase consulting help for their applications projects. Overall, the demand for systems integration services increased 10 percent from 2004 to 2005.
Source: Forrester Research
E-mail Habits and Systems Evolve
Eighty-two percent of IT managers say the percentage of employees accessing their e-mail from home has increased. More than 42 percent said they would probably or definitely replace their back-end messaging infrastructure to improve performance or lower costs, if it allowed them to keep their current desktop clients.
Source: Osterman Research and Scalix
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