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AT ORACLE: Briefs
Oracle Announces Four New Data Hubs
Oracle Announces Common Language Runtime Extensions
The forthcoming Oracle Database 10g Release 2 will provide extensions for Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing .NET developers to run stored procedures from Oracle Database more quickly and easily. As the runtime environment for the .NET Framework, CLR runs the code and provides services that make the development process easier.
"The new Oracle Database Extensions for .NET will shorten development time for .NET developers while significantly easing the development process," says Valerie Ashe, Oracle principal product director. "The availability of these extensions is the next phase in Oracle's long-standing commitment to providing an open, secure database that works on whichever platform our customers choose—Windows with .NET; PHP with Linux; or Java with either Windows, Linux, or Macintosh OS X."
According to Microsoft, CLR makes it easy to design components and applications whose objects interact across languages. Objects written in different languages can communicate with each other, and their behaviors can be tightly integrated.
Oracle, an active member of the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) Program, also offers Oracle Data Provider for .NET, which features optimized data access to the Oracle database from a .NET environment, and Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET, a tightly integrated plug-in for Visual Studio .NET that brings the power of Oracle Database to Visual Studio .NET developers.
Oracle 10g Products Releases on Mac OS X
Oracle has released Oracle Database 10g and Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Mac OS X, enabling Apple Computer's customers and partners to develop and deploy Oracle applications on Apple hardware such as the Xserve G5 and Xserve RAID. Companies of all sizes now have a world-class database with the development capabilities to support and grow their business on the Macintosh platform.
"The combination of Oracle Database 10g and Apple Xserve G5 and Xserve RAID addresses the needs of customers seeking an affordable, enterprise-class database solution," says Sanjay Sadhu, Oracle director of Worldwide Alliances and Channels. "With the release of Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Mac OS X, Oracle is firmly committed to making the Mac a first-rate development platform as well."
Oracle Database 10g Lite for the Mobile Workforce
Oracle has released Oracle Database 10g Lite, the first database to extend the power of grid computing to the mobile workforce with a complete, integrated solution for developing and deploying mobile applications. By enabling persistent access to applications and data without continuous connectivity to back-end systems, Oracle Database 10g Lite makes mobile workforces more efficient, productive, and responsive.
"Oracle Database 10g Lite is a complete, integrated, secure database for building, deploying, and managing mobile applications for a broad range of mobile devices," says Allan Saunders, Oracle product director. "With centralized user provisioning, identity management, and development tools that increase developer productivity, it's by far the best choice for mobile enterprises."
Oracle Database 10g Lite enables mobile users to synchronize data seamlessly between their corporate database and mobile devices at regular intervals and is transport-agnostic, allowing transfer of data on any connection medium, including LAN, wireless, satellite, and radio. In case of a network failure, Oracle Database 10g Lite's advanced recovery systems enable users to resume activity from point-in-time checkpoints.
Oracle Database 10g Lite is available immediately for free download from OTN.
Oracle Introduces Resilient Low-Cost Storage Initiative
Further reducing the cost of computing, Oracle has introduced the Resilient Low-Cost Storage Initiative, to help organizations use modular, low-cost storage arrays in both departmental and enterprise environments. The use of low-cost storage such as Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) disk-based arrays, in conjunction with Oracle Database 10g, enables organizations to build affordable, highly available, and scalable database storage grids to support corporate IT initiatives.
Resilient low-cost storage is ideal for online disk backup and recovery, development and testing databases, reporting databases, disaster recovery databases, and data warehouses. Industry leaders including Apple Computer, Dell, EMC, Engenio Information Technologies, HP, MPC Computers, and Network Appliance have partnered with Oracle to support low-cost storage solutions. Together, these companies are developing recommended database storage configurations and best practices for the deployment of low-cost storage with Oracle Database 10g.
IDC Whitepaper Touts Oracle Business Intelligence
In the IDC white paper "Why Consider Oracle for Business Intelligence?", authors Dan Vesset and Henry Morris outline the features and benefits of the Oracle Business Intelligence solution, concluding that Oracle is well positioned to enable decision process automation.
The free 12-page white paper addresses the fundamental shift in the way businesses are making decisions in today's rapidly changing environment, where the need for business analytics is reaching more organizations and extends to a wider range of users, from executives and line-of-business managers to analysts and other knowledge workers.
"Which products or customers are most profitable? How many products should be manufactured to meet demand this month? How do this month's sales compare year over year? These are just some examples of the questions the Oracle Business Intelligence solution can help organizations answer," says Nichelle Rhone-Alford, Oracle product director. Rhone-Alford points out that Oracle Database is the only analysis-ready database with embedded extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL); online analytical processing (OLAP); and data mining capabilities built into the data server. Oracle Application Server includes built-in portal services to deliver organized and personalized access to your business intelligence applications. And Oracle E-Business Suite Corporate Performance Management includes prepackaged applications for measuring and monitoring your business performance.
Study Shows Oracle Grid Customers Achieve 150 Percent ROI
How much can you save with Oracle grid computing? A Mainstay Partners study examining real-world grid savings and benefits found that Oracle customers are achieving, on average, a 150 percent return on investment (ROI) over a five-year period.
The study—which included the Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell, Electronic Arts, Ohio Savings Bank, University of Oslo, and Vanderbilt University—found that participants achieved, on average, a 43 percent internal rate of return, 123 percent savings (in the first year), 278 percent projected savings (over five years) on hardware, 24 percent software savings, and a 10 percent computing performance improvement.
"The study found that customers have benefited significantly by migrating from traditional high-end SMP platforms to lower-cost standardized grids of Intel-based servers running Oracle Database 10g on Linux," says John Brust, Oracle principal product director.
Download a free copy of Mainstay Partners' aggregate ROI study, Oracle 10g Software Infrastructure: Making Enterprise Grid Computing a Reality, from oracle.com/technologies/grid/grid_roi.html.
Oracle Releases Quarterly Critical Patch Update
In April 12, Oracle released its second quarterly Critical Patch Update, a comprehensive patch that addresses security vulnerabilities and includes fixes that customers are likely to apply, prerequisites for the security fixes, or both.
"Customers have told us they prefer to have a regular, planned schedule for patching their systems," says Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle chief security officer. "We found that a quarterly schedule strikes a smart balance between issuing patches often enough to protect against serious vulnerabilities and issuing patches so often that customers can't keep up with them."
Critical Patch Updates include a risk matrix as a means for customers to gauge the severity of the vulnerabilities addressed. The risk matrix lists the vulnerabilities fixed in the Critical Patch Update and describes their nature and scope, and it indicates each vulnerability's threat to confidentiality, integrity, and availability; conditions required for exploitation; and the product component affected, among other information.
Oracle's Critical Patch Updates are cumulative from the last patch set, so only the most recent update needs to be installed. Critical Patch Updates are scheduled to be issued to customers in 2005 on the Tuesday closest to the middle of the first month of each quarter: January 18, April 12, July 12, and October 18. Oracle customers will be notified of Critical Patch Updates via Oracle MetaLink, the OTN Security Alerts page, and the Oracle Security RSS news feed.
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Benchmarks
Oracle continues to achieve world-record benchmark performance, including a 3TB TPC-H record on Sun, a TPC-C record on Linux, and a SPECjAppServer 2002 DualNode record. Results include the following:
- On a Sun Fire E25K with seventy-two 1.2GHz Ultra SPARC IV processors running Solaris 10, Oracle Database 10g with Automatic Storage Management (ASM) achieved 59,435.7 QphH@3000GB*, with a price/performance ratio of US$114.00/QphH@3000GB.
- On an HP Integrity rx4640 with four Intel Itanium 2 1.6GHz processors running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3, Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition achieved 161,217 tpmC (transactions per minute) with a price/performance ratio of US$3.94/tpmC.
- Oracle Application Server 10g achieved 1,674.13 TOPS@DualNode (total operations per second) and a price/performance ratio of US$132.52 TOPS@DualNode.
As of 1/27/05: The Sun Fire E25K system delivered 59,435.7 QphH@3000GB at a price/performance ratio of US$114/QphH@3000GB, with a scheduled availability of 7/27/05. As of 11/22/04: HP Integrity rx4640, 161,217 tpmC, US$3.94/tpmC, available December 17, 2004. As of 1/10/04: On Dell PowerEdge 7250 server with four Intel Itanium 2 1.6GHz processors and Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3, Oracle achieved 1,674.13 TOPS@DualNode (total operations per second) with a price/performance ratio of US$132.52 TOPS@DualNode.
Sources: Transaction Processing Performance Council and www.spec.org.
* The performance metric is called the TPC-H Composite Query-per-Hour Performance Metric (QphH@Size) and reflects the capability of the system to process queries.
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