As Published In September/October 2005

Cover Feature

Oracle Database 10g Just Got Better
By Kelli Wiseth

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 provides more flexibility, lowers costs, and delivers higher quality of service.

Two years ago, when Oracle introduced Oracle Database 10g, the first database for grid computing, the concept of enterprise grid computing was in its infancy. Today enterprise grid computing is maturing, evidenced by developments such as the 60-member (and counting) Enterprise Grid Alliance and its release of a reference model to guide enterprises in the adoption of grid computing, and Project MegaGrid, a group project of Dell, EMC, Intel, and Oracle created to develop a standard approach to building and deploying enterprise grids. Over the past two years, many of the benefits of enterprise grid computing, including better utilization of IT resources—which leads to greater flexibility, lower costs, and higher quality of service—have become the mantra of forward-thinking CEOs and CIOs.

With numerous new features in the areas of performance, scalability, reliability, and security, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 promises to help customers achieve these benefits and more. Plus, enhancements that continue to simplify and automate database management make it easier for IT staff to deliver a higher quality of service and lower their data-center costs.

"Release 2 solidifies Oracle Database's role as the foundation for an enterprise grid infrastructure, ensuring that IT resources are provisioned where needed, when needed," says Ken Jacobs, vice president of product strategy at Oracle. "In this release, Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) can manage storage for multiple databases within the grid, even when multiple versions of Oracle are used, to help ensure that storage management is cost-effective and flexible. Faster sorting (as much as five times faster) and enhancements in areas such as workload management, job scheduling, and system management deliver more-efficient resource utilization."

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 provides many benefits "not only for those focused strictly on grid computing but also for any organization interested in lowering costs, improving performance, and improving security," adds Jacobs. "With numerous high-profile breaches over the last year—3.9 million customer accounts lost in transit from one of the world's largest banks, and a staggering 40 million accounts stolen from a credit card processing agent this past summer—security is paramount to any organization today, large or small."

To ensure that unauthorized users cannot compromise sensitive user data, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 provides Transparent Data Encryption, which enables data to be easily and automatically encrypted on disk. "Allowing organizations to secure sensitive data centrally inside their database rather than through complex application programming interfaces is simply more cost-effective, since it saves development time. Plus, ensuring that sensitive user data remains confidential can bolster customer confidence, one of the measures of quality of service," says Jacobs.

Furthermore, many of the new or improved features of Oracle Database 10g Release 2 help lower infrastructure costs.

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is "a useful extension of the technology with some solid new features that are going to improve time on task, opening up the possibility for cost savings," says David Scott, database practice manager at Atlanta, Georgia-based Intec Telecom Systems. Intec develops world-class operations and business-support systems used by more than 60 percent of the world's largest telecommunications carriers in more than 70 countries. The majority of Intec's nearly 700 implementations run on Oracle. Scott's role at Intec involves more than just keeping abreast of trends; he also evangelizes proper use and application of various technologies, including Oracle, for the product group to meet Intec customers' needs.

Scott is one of many beta testers who worked with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 during a beta-test week at Oracle headquarters last May (see "DBAs Discuss Oracle Database 10g Release 2," page 44). "I think Oracle Database 10g Release 2 will add additional benefits to Intec's offering, both from a technology and a business standpoint," offers Scott. There's a lot to like in the new release, he adds, noting the vastly improved installation experience for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) with the Cluster Verification Utility and Oracle Clusterware—an improvement Scott says could have some significant impact in reducing costs for Intec.

Snapshots Intec Telecom Systems www.intec-telecom-systems.com Location: Atlanta, Georgia (North American headquarters) Profile: Develops world-class operations and business-support systems used by more than 60 percent of the world's largest telecommunications carriers. Software: Oracle9i Database, Oracle Database 10g Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide www.starwoodhotels.com Location: White Plains, New York Profile: Starwood is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world, with approximately 750 properties in more than 80 countries and 120,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. Starwood Corporation is a fully integrated owner, operator, and franchiser of hotels and resorts including St. Regis, the Luxury Collection, Sheraton, Westin, W, and Four Points by Sheraton; and Starwood Vacation Ownership, one of the premier developers and operators of vacation interval ownership resorts. Software: Oracle9i Database, Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Motorola www.motorola.com/biometrics Location: Anaheim, California Profile: Motorola's Biometrics Solutions division sells an automated fingerprint identification system, Printrak BIS, which runs on Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and takes advantage of Oracle's support for Large Objects (LOB), XML, Oracle Text, and Oracle Data Pump. Software: Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle Text, Oracle Advanced Replication

In addition to lowering costs, leading companies today are trying to obtain flexibility and higher quality of service. For example, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide is undergoing an IT transformation designed to meet these goals using Oracle Database 10g Release 2 for a key foundational element: the operational data store at the heart of their online transaction environment.

A Highly Available Solution

One of the largest hotel and leisure companies in the world, Starwood owns, leases, franchises, or manages 750 hotels in 80 countries, providing more than a quarter of a million rooms worldwide. To deliver the flexibility and availability required in a highly competitive business environment, Starwood is currently in the midst of a multiyear, multifaceted series of IT projects that includes retiring a mainframe, explains Tom Conophy, Starwood executive vice president and chief technology officer.

Starwood's application portfolio includes mainframe-based reservation and customer-loyalty (Starwood Preferred Guest) systems, as well as distribution systems, Web sites, call centers, content management, and marketing systems that run on Oracle. Conophy says Starwood is moving all of its mainframe-based applications to "an enterprisewide architecture that includes Web-centric end-user interfaces; service-oriented architecture [SOA] for business-logic exposure; and an operational data store as a foundational piece, with Oracle Database 10g at the heart of that."

Starwood's operational data store is currently running Oracle Database 10g and will be upgraded to Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on a three-node cluster with Oracle RAC. Oracle Database 10g Release 2 includes some important new performance and availability features, such as runtime load balancing across all nodes in the cluster, that will help ensure that Starwood meets its operational-service-level goals. "The overriding benefit we're seeking from Oracle Database 10g is high availability of our system," says Bill Camp, Starwood's vice president of enterprise system information. "We intend to take advantage of Oracle Database 10g Release 2 to reduce both planned and unplanned outages. We're looking for a very high-availability environment." Conophy adds that Starwood is targeting 99.999 percent availability for its Oracle-based operational data store. "We're building out this platform powered by Oracle Database 10g to drive the online engine that more and more of our guests are shifting to," says Conophy. "No matter how they get to the system—from our branded Web site, call center, travel agent, or third-party Web site—the system must be available."

Starwood is making a "significant investment in transforming its technology platform to support the enormous growth that we expect over the next few years, given hotel growth and the massive shift to online booking," says Conophy, noting that close to 10 percent of Starwood's revenue comes from its branded Web sites. He adds that Starwood is "building out a series of scalable engines that encompass core components that can be leveraged for existing and new systems—shopping engines, inventory engines, booking engines, loyalty engines."

The mainframe migration is just one of Starwood's IT projects involving Oracle. The company has several deployments of Oracle Database 10g that will be upgraded to Oracle Database 10g Release 2, including the content management system that feeds its external Web sites. One of the key reasons to upgrade that particular system to Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is to take advantage of the XQuery support in the new release—the first commercial database management system to support the W3C's XQuery language. The benefit? Greater flexibility for developers.

"XQuery support will be great for our content management system, since the content is stored in XML format," says Arup Nanda, Starwood's director of database engineering and operations. Support for XQuery in the database gives developers more choices. "The flexibility simply increases tremendously for the developer community," says Nanda. This native support for XQuery means that developers can query XML, relational, object-relational, and repository data using the industry-standard query language for querying XML.

Manage, Administer, and Develop with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Download pdf

A Flexible, Manageable Foundation

Flexibility is also an important requirement for global communications leader Motorola, particularly for the underlying data model contained in Motorola's database. The company's Biometrics Solutions, a division of its Government and Enterprise Mobility Solutions (GEMS) unit, has provided automated fingerprint and palm-print identification systems, inkless live-scan stations, and mobile fingerprint capture solutions to government and enterprise customers around the world for more than three decades.

The latest generation of the Biometrics Solutions division's Printrak Biometric Identification Solution (BIS) is an integrated suite of applications that currently runs on Oracle Database 10g and is used by law enforcement, government, and civil agencies in more than 37 countries. All new installations of Printrak BIS will be deployed on Oracle Database 10g Release 2.

Printrak BIS relies on Oracle Text to handle indexing and processing of the massive amounts of data that flow through the system. Although Printrak BIS is sometimes referred to generically as an "automated fingerprint identification system," the system processes much more than fingerprints. For example, a typical Printrak BIS for law enforcement manages information related to criminal investigations, while for customers outside of law enforcement—school districts or casinos, for example, where job applicants may nonetheless be cross-checked against criminal databases as part of the employment screening process—the system holds data associated with applicants, rather than criminals. Besides fingerprint information related to a criminal investigation or a job application, a BIS system may also include palm prints, facial images, iris images, signatures, audio clips, or demographic information.

Next Steps DOWNLOAD Oracle Database 10g Release 2 READ more about Oracle Database 10g Release 2 oracle.com/technology/products/ database/oracle10g/pdf/BWP_Overview_10gR2_060205.pdf oracle.com/technology/products/database/oracle10g LEARN about Project MegaGrid VISIT the Enterprise Grid Alliance

"Each customer requires a different schema for the demographic and case- or applicant-related information they store, so we use XML for maximum flexibility," says Aris Prassinos, distinguished member of technical staff for Motorola's Biometrics Solutions division. The typical Printrak BIS system stores several million rows containing XML data with several thousand rows added or updated each day. For example, one Printrak BIS system stores about 10 million rows of search XML data averaging 2 to 3K in length, with each row containing about 50 XML elements. Considering that a 1,000-ppi scan of a palm can comprise several megabytes, it's not surprising that the typical Motorola Printrak BIS database system is large—"anywhere from 1, 2, or 3 terabytes is quite common," says Prassinos.

Motorola's system relies heavily on all the automated management features of Oracle Database 10g, from automatic memory management to undo management and checkpoint tuning, says Prassinos. Many Printrak BIS customer sites don't have in-house resources to tune and manage the system after it's set up and running, he explains, so the automated management features of Oracle Database 10g "are enormously important to our customers, who rarely have the staff to support our systems."

Furthermore, "it's futile to spend a lot of time tuning up front, when in a matter of months the workload is completely different," says Prassinos. "With the automatic tuning and management features built into Oracle Database 10g, the system adjusts itself over time." Starwood's Nanda agrees, noting that with Oracle Database 10g Release 2, administration is "even simpler than before." Nanda adds that this makes the DBA's job "much easier, for novices and experts alike."

Conclusion

The growth of the Enterprise Grid Alliance and other initiatives such as Project MegaGrid is just one indication of how enterprise grid computing is maturing. However, the true test of maturity is measured in terms of customer success. According to Oracle's Jacobs, "Over the past 18 months, we've witnessed rapid adoption of Oracle Database 10g by our customers and partners, who've upgraded from prior releases or migrated their applications off legacy systems."

Forward-looking organizations such as Starwood, with Oracle at the core of its operational data store; Motorola, with Printrak BIS; and many more will derive even greater benefit from the unique features of Oracle Database 10g Release 2.

"Oracle Database 10g Release 2 continues to build on the key capabilities that were introduced with Oracle Database 10g to provide the flexible foundation required for enterprise grid computing," says Jacobs. "What matters most, of course, is that we continue to focus on customer requirements, helping customers meet their business and technical needs, providing greater flexibility, and delivering the highest quality of service at the lowest possible cost of ownership."

What's New in Oracle Database 10g Release 2? Oracle continues to enhance support for grid computing with Oracle Database 10g Release 2, with hundreds of improvements and some important new features. Here are a few highlights. Automatic Storage Management (ASM). Introduced in Oracle Database 10g Release 1, ASM has several key improvements, starting with a new deployment model. Single-instance Oracle databases and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) can now share the same ASM instance, so you can further consolidate storage and have one large ASM pool used by all your Oracle instances, whether Oracle RAC or not. Also, ASM is now integrated with Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) and Oracle Enterprise Manager. DBCA lets DBAs create an ASM instance and configure the disk groups for database creation. Oracle Enterprise Manager lets DBAs manage and monitor ASM and disk groups, and it automates the process of converting an existing non-ASM database onto ASM-based storage. In addition, ASM now supports FTP and also includes a new command-line tool. Oracle Clusterware. The software formerly known as "Cluster Ready Services" has been de-coupled from Oracle RAC and provides failover for applications separately from Oracle RAC. Clusterware is available with ASM, with single-instance Oracle Database 10g, and with Oracle RAC. In addition, developers can now use a Clusterware application-programming interface (API) to tap into the cluster infrastructure. Now, rather than purchasing third-party cluster management software, customers can use Oracle Clusterware at no extra cost to their Oracle Database license. In addition, Oracle Clusterware includes a new Cluster Verification Utility that performs a preliminary check of required cluster elements. This utility can be invoked at any stage of cluster configuration, greatly simplifying the installation, configuration, and overall management of Oracle Clusterware environments. Oracle HTML DB. Nonprogrammers, including DBAs, can easily develop new database-centric applications using only a Web browser. With Oracle Database 10g Release 2, HTML DB has been improved with a new master-detail wizard that requires no coding, charting enhancements—the Chart wizard now provides stacked bar, cluster bar, and dial charts, for example—better documentation, and online help. Oracle RAC. Now, a load-balancing advisory monitors the workload of each service in an Oracle RAC instance. The advisory creates fast application notification (FAN) events to provide feedback that enables routing by the connection pool to respond quickly to changing conditions in the system. At steady state, the system approaches equilibrium with optimal service times across all Oracle Database 10g RAC instances. Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) and Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) connection pools are integrated to provide the best connection to an application request, instead of a random connection from the pool. Furthermore, Oracle connection pool clients—Oracle Call Interface, ODP.NET, and JDBC—are integrated with the load-balancing advisory. Runtime connection load balancing enables connection pools to route work requests to the connections that can best serve the work based on the FAN events received from Oracle RAC. Requests can be routed according to different policies. Transparent Data Encryption. Transparent Data Encryption enables organizations to easily protect sensitive data in Oracle databases, without any changes to their applications. It's a key-based access control system that enables encryption without requiring users or applications to manage the encryption keys. A master key is generated and stored in an external security module, such as Oracle Wallet, with the option of limiting access to only the security administrator—thus ensuring appropriate checks and balances and adherence to organizationwide security policies. In other words, security is enhanced because no single administrator need be granted complete access to all data. Once the master key is generated, the server uses it to encrypt the encryption key for each table that contains encrypted column data. The keys for all tables containing encrypted columns are encrypted with this database server master key and stored in a dictionary table in the database, so no encryption keys are stored in clear text. Supported encryption algorithms include Advanced Encryption Standard (AES192, which uses a 192-bit-length key; the default) and Triple DES (Data Encryption Standard), both industry-standard encryption algorithms. Windows .NET integration. Oracle Database 10g Release 2 for Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Windows XP includes the common language runtime (CLR) environment running as an external host process in tandem with the Oracle database instance. Application developers can write stored procedures and functions using any .NET-compliant language, such as C# or Visual Basic .NET, and use these .NET stored procedures in the database, just as they can use PL/SQL or Java stored procedures. XQuery. Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is the first commercial database to support XQuery, a comprehensive query language for XML data. Oracle's native XQuery engine compiles XQuery expressions into the same internal data structures as SQL for high performance. Oracle also provides a downloadable XML Query midtier-based implementation that can be used to query across nondatabase sources.

DBAs Discuss Oracle Database 10g Release User group representatives from all over the world descended on Oracle headquarters in May 2005 for Oracle Database 10g Release 2 beta-testing week. Despite diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise, they all agreed on one thing—they like the steps Oracle is taking in Oracle Database 10g Release 2, especially in a few key areas. Here's what some beta testers cited as their favorite things. David Scott, database practice manager, Intec Telecom Systems. Scott is pleased with the improved install process for Oracle Database 10g Release 2. He says the new release is "significantly faster to install [and] significantly easier to deal with in many ways. One of the things that I'm absolutely thrilled about is the pre-upgrade information utility that the Database Upgrade Assistant performs, and the Cluster Verification Utility. Doing all those checks manually can take a long time, especially if someone is not that familiar with the underlying operating system," says Scott. Daniel Liu, senior technical consultant, First American Real Estate Solutions. Liu participated in beta testing for the initial release of Oracle Database 10g and Release 2. "Using the same benchmark test, a set of queries from First American, I see a huge performance lift" in going from Oracle9i Database to Oracle Database 10g Release 2, he says. "That's really key," says Liu, because it means he'll be able to get far better performance out of his system despite increased workload. Murali Vallath, independent Oracle consultant, Summersky Enterprises. Vallath is pleased with the performance of both Oracle RAC and ASM. The author of two books on Oracle RAC and president of the Oracle RAC special interest group (www.oracleracsig.org), Vallath has been working with Oracle RAC since its beginnings, and his experience with clusters goes back to the days of Digital VAX. "The proactive load-balancing method is a wonderful feature," says Vallath, noting the new runtime load-balancing capabilities in Oracle Database 10g Release 2 RAC. In addition, during testing, Vallath converted 10GB worth of data (from Oracle Database 10g) to an ASM implementation under Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and was impressed with the results. "The conversion from a non-ASM file system to ASM took less than 11 minutes," he says. Byron Pearce, senior technical consultant, Tenure Systems. Pearce finds the benefits of ASM hit on several levels, not all of them technical. To effectively provision storage for large-scale deployments, "DBAs and system administrators need to cooperate completely," says Pearce, noting that he was very skeptical of ASM. "I'm an old Veritas UNIX administrator," he says. "I like wearing my UNIX hat. But what we have seen is, ASM handles the workload; it keeps the system's I/Os extremely level." Maurice Aelion, manager, IT and open systems professional services, Israeli-based SCP Systems. Aelion has been working on Oracle since the third release of the database, and he has no doubt that Oracle's grid computing vision is the way of the future. "Oracle is going to make grid computing happen," says Aelion. "The steps Oracle is taking are steps in the right direction." For a full report on the beta test week, read OTN's "Inside Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Beta Week Testing."