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Feature
Oracle Inside
By David Baum
From gambling to gene splicing, Oracle products are a key embedded ingredient of third-party applications and devices.
It's Saturday night, and you're ready to hit the town. Your first stop is Sandia Casino, where your regular patronage has earned enough Peak Rewards points for a free steak dinner. Sandia knows you well, thanks to an Oracle-based casino management system from Konami Gaming, an Oracle partner based in Las Vegas and Osaka, Japan.
As you use your Sandia loyalty card at gaming tables, slot machines, bingo, and other gambling venues, your activities are recorded in an Oracle database that has been embedded in the Konami Casino Management System (KCMS). Sandia Casino uses the information to offer you special bonuses and Advanced Incentives (free slot machine play) based on your level of play.
"Each registered guest at Sandia leaves a data trail that is tracked and analyzed with Oracle decision support tools," says Karen Koetz, director of the Sales Systems Division at Konami Gaming. "The data allows Sandia to enhance your experience by offering personalized services."
According to Koetz, most casinos have loyalty programs that pay back about 1 percent of what patrons spend—similar to frequent flier programs. Sandia uses KCMS to manage this information, along with many other aspects of its business.
Whereas Konami is the expert on gaming, Koetz and her colleagues depend on Oracle to manage their information. Using Oracle technology, KCMS tracks total revenue by game type such as slot machines, tables, Keno, sports book, and bingo—and it handles cage management, where patrons cash checks and obtain credit markers. Each slot machine contains a Konami Slot Machine Interface Board (SMIB) to manage transactions through several meters. Metered events include money in, money out, bills and tickets inserted, jackpots paid, and so on. Moreover, due to the transaction processing power of Oracle, the SMIB also records all patron transactions and other data that provide for game-level patron and slot accounting.
"As far as Oracle is concerned, each slot machine is simply a node on a TCP/IP network," explains Tom Soukup, senior director of R&D for the Systems Division at Konami Gaming. All the machines are linked via 100MB-per-second Ethernet connections, so they can continually upload data to a centralized Oracle database.
According to Soukup, casinos generate an immense quantity of data, which makes Oracle database technology an ideal choice. For example, Sandia's 1,800 slot machines log more than 14 million database inserts and updates every day. "A single patron might generate a thousand records from one day of gaming," Soukup explains. "Each night we aggregate that information into a historical operational data store." KCMS customers use this data via Oracle Discoverer to analyze patron activities and gaming trends, which helps them roll out highly targeted marketing campaigns as well as award points and Advanced Incentive free slot play to big spenders and regular customers.
Rising Tide of Solutions
Konami is not alone. More than 15,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) and device manufacturers depend on Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies to create industry-specific solutions. As part of Oracle's PartnerNetwork program, these companies integrate Oracle software into a wide variety of hardware and software products.
"Oracle partners take advantage of the Oracle PartnerNetwork program to offer Oracle technology to new customers that have limited budgets and technical resources," says Sanjay Sinha, senior director of business development in the Server Technologies group at Oracle. "They can embed Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g, and other Oracle software into their applications and devices to meet customer demands for low-cost, reliable, easy-to-administer software infrastructure."
Many partners offer turnkey solutions based on Oracle Embedded Software Licensing (ESL), in which Oracle technology is fully integrated into the application or device. Sinha says one of the reasons Oracle's embedded software program is so popular is that Oracle has gone to great lengths to simplify the installation and configuration procedures. "End users don't need to be involved in installing and using Oracle—it can be completely under the covers," he explains. "The prepackaged version we offer to partners allows them to control the underlying Oracle infrastructure that the end customer deploys. This proves to be beneficial for ISVs as they can control the version and configuration parameters of the Oracle software that their customers deploy. This brings advantages for the ISVs as the customer configuration is well known and therefore is easier to support and performance is consistent across the customer base."
This formula has worked well for Sage France, a world-leading supplier of accounting and business management software to small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) that operates in established markets such as Europe and North America as well as in emerging markets throughout Africa and Asia. Sage France is an operating unit of the Sage Group.
"We are meeting the changing needs of SMBs by offering complementary products for sales and customer service, industry-specific production processes, and management reporting," sums up Florence Méro, midmarket division director for Sage France. "End users don't need to trouble themselves with installing or configuring Oracle software, yet they gain an enterprise-caliber database for a very nominal price."
For example, Sage has embedded Oracle Database 10g technology within its Sage 1000 Enterprise software, which encompasses accounting, asset management, cash management, consolidation, customer relationship management, and other essential business functions. Méro says the Oracle software enhances Sage's solutions by providing self-administration tools and processes that are ideal for SMBs. "The difficulty for a business management software company such as Sage is to efficiently integrate relational database technology without burdening customers with too much complexity," she says. "Our customers are looking for performance and ease of use. Before we started working with Oracle, they had to perform a separate installation procedure to deploy the database. Now Oracle Database technology is built right into our software packages, so they run one procedure to obtain a dynamic, instant implementation."
Turnkey Functionality
Oracle's Sinha says the idea behind the ESL program is to make it easy for ISVs to create turnkey applications for customers. Because the software is embedded, little or no IT involvement is required. "The end customer simply installs the ISV application, and all Oracle technology is simply silently installed as part of the ISV application install process," says Sinha. "It is preconfigured, so it works right out of the box. They don't need IT pros to handle backups, recovery, tablespace management, and so forth. In other words, they get the benefits of a highly reliable, scalable, and secure database or application server without the cost or resource requirements normally associated with an enterprise-scale technology solution."
According to Didier Taormina, product marketing director of the midmarket division at Sage France, selecting, configuring, and maintaining a relational database management system is a job for database administrators and qualified IT specialists, yet companies with fewer than about 2,000 employees generally can't afford these resources. "We're making it easy for SMBs to utilize complete business management solutions," he says. "This gives our customers a major competitive advantage."
Konami Gaming's Soukup agrees. "We like Oracle technology because it is easy to integrate, manage, and use," he emphasizes. "We manage the database for our clients. In some cases, we manage their servers as well. We give them Oracle Discoverer, so they can handle their own reporting, business analysis, and data mining. It's a very workable scenario."
Icing on the Cake
snapSHOTS
Konami Gaming, Inc.
Konami Gaming, Inc., a subsidiary of Konami Corporation, manufactures, sells, and services gaming machines and casino management systems that utilize the latest Oracle software.
Industry: Amusement, entertainment, gaming
Headquarters: Las Vegas, Nevada, and Osaka, Japan
Annual revenue: US$2.5 billion (Konami Corporation)
Oracle products: Oracle9i Database, Oracle9i Advanced Security, Oracle Discoverer, Oracle JDeveloper
Applied Biosystems
Scientists and researchers use tools from Applied Biosystems to make scientific discoveries, develop new pharmaceuticals, and conduct standardized testing. The company develops and markets instrument-based systems, consumables, software, and services.
Industry: Life sciences
Headquarters: Foster City, California
Annual revenue: US$1.7 billion
Oracle products: Oracle Database 10g
The Sage Group
Founded in 1981, the Sage Group is a leading international supplier of accounting and business management software solutions and related products and services for small-to-midsize enterprises. The company employs more than 9,000 people worldwide and supports more than 4.4 million customers.
Industry: Technology
Headquarters: London
Annual revenue: £2.5billion
Oracle products: Oracle Database 10g
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Partners such as Sage and Konami not only appreciate industry-leading database management technology, they also get to take advantage of all the other great innovations that make Oracle an industry leader, such as database replication, clustering, and grid technology. "Instead of deploying one server with 12 CPUs, we'll be able to deploy two servers with 8 CPUs in each," Soukup notes. "This will allow us to take one of the server clusters down for maintenance while the other one remains online, minimizing the possibility for disruption at the casino."
Konami Gaming also uses Oracle database replication technology to maintain multiple copies of patron tables. This way, for casino operators with multiple facilities, their guests can earn points at one casino and spend them at another, because each casino will always have the latest information about each customer. "Rather than creating this type of replication technology from scratch, we decided to use what was available from Oracle," says Soukup. "The same goes for data encryption. As security becomes more critical, we are relying on tools within Oracle, so we don't have to develop all this complex technology from scratch."
Market Momentum
Other device manufacturers and ISVs choose to embed Oracle technology because of the broad base of Oracle expertise in the development community. "Basing our technology on Oracle makes it easy to find qualified resources with the appropriate skill sets," says Vince Woodall, a product manager at Applied Biosystems in Foster City, California.
Applied Biosystems, which has been working with Oracle for nearly 20 years, created the first commercial laboratory information management system (LIMS) in the early 1980s and, soon after, created the first LIMS based on a relational database. Its LIMS technology has since spread far and wide. Pick up a prescription at your neighborhood drugstore, and the chances are one in five that the label listing the expiration data and lot number was derived from an Oracle database resident in Applied Biosystems' most popular LIMS, SQL*LIMS.
Today, with an intensive focus on research and standardized testing, Applied Biosystems is a driving force in the life sciences industry. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies use Applied Biosystems products to discover and develop new drugs more effectively. The company has embedded Oracle technology in instruments that handle DNA sequencing, robotics, mass spectrometry, and other laboratory devices.
"We have evaluated other database vendors over the years, but Oracle has been the logical choice for us all along," says Woodall. "Part of the reason is that Oracle is so well accepted among our client base." Applied Biosystems has an installed base of approximately 180,000 instrument systems in nearly 100 countries, and now the company is extending into manufacturing sectors from food and beverages to plastics.
License Options for Partners
Applied Biosystems sells application-specific, full-use (ASFU) licenses of Oracle software with its SQL*LIMS systems, because its customers often want the option to configure, monitor, and manage the database themselves. (ASFU licenses differ from Oracle's full-use development licenses, which give customers the right to develop new database applications.) Applied Biosystems laboratory devices include embedded databases because there is little need to configure these systems. Embedded-software licenses carry decisive price-point advantages.
According to Woodall, Oracle has a pedigree of 17 security certifications, which gives its technology an edge in carefully regulated, highly competitive industries. "We supply what our customers need right out of the box: secure, scalable, validation-ready solutions," he says. "Oracle enhances our ability to deliver a finished product that is well accepted in the marketplace."
This is partially a result of Oracle's continuous quest to understand customer needs in industries and market segments from government to manufacturing to healthcare. Oracle hosts many industry-specific customer advisory boards to stay abreast of important developments in these sectors and participates in industry-specific consortia and standards bodies.
"Our partnership with Oracle extends beyond pure technology," Woodall concludes. "We have a joint connection to the customer, based on our shared knowledge of the life sciences domain. This makes it easier for us to construct open solutions that our customers can extend and integrate into their own laboratory and research environments."
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TimesTen Delivers Exceptional Performance with Embedded In-Memory Database
When it comes to database performance, the biggest bottleneck has always been the time it takes to find data on disk and move it into memory, where it can be processed by the requesting application. For applications that require blazing-fast data management, one solution is to preload the entire database into computer memory, eliminating most of the I/O operations. However, even when an entire database is resident in memory, a standard relational database must still execute certain CPU-intensive algorithms that are central to its disk-oriented design. In other words, a standard relational database can't assume the data will always remain in memory, so its algorithms must search for the location, copy the data, and do other operations that would be unnecessary if the data were guaranteed to always remain in memory.
With its acquisition of TimesTen in June 2005, Oracle has obtained a solution to this quandary.
"Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database is a memory-optimized relational database that empowers applications with instant responsiveness and very high throughput," says Tim Shetler, vice president of marketing for the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database. "Deployed in the application tier as a cache or embedded database, this unique database management system operates on data stores that fit entirely in physical memory using standard SQL interfaces."
The TimesTen algorithms have been designed to take advantage of the memory residency of the data, and the TimesTen index and data structures are designed for fast memory access. Database operations execute with maximum efficiency, achieving dramatic gains in performance—even compared to a fully cached RDBMS. "On average, this in-memory database is an order of magnitude faster because of its carefully constructed architecture," says Shetler. "That's where the name 'TimesTen' comes from."
Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database libraries are built for embedding within applications, eliminating context switching and unnecessary network operations, further improving performance. Additionally, by using the Cache Connect to Oracle option, Oracle customers and partners can extend comparable performance gains to Oracle databases that are too large to fit in memory. "Application developers can use the Cache Connect to Oracle option to deliver vast amounts of information at real-time speeds," says Shetler. "This strategy enables the power of TimesTen to be applied to an Oracle disk-based database."
As part of the TimesTen acquisition, Oracle stated its intention to embed the TimesTen In-Memory Database into complete vertical solutions for industries such as telecom, capital markets, and defense. For example, wireless service providers use TimesTen software to create prepaid billing software that allows them to debit customer balances in real time.
"Already, 1,500 companies around the world use TimesTen and about 1,200 of them don't know it because it is transparent—it is fully embedded within their solutions," says Shetler.
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David Baum (david@dbaumcomm.com) is a freelance business writer based in Santa Barbara, California.
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