As Published In January/February 2006

Powering Windows
By David A. Kelly

Oracle and Microsoft bring scalability, availability, and lower costs to business.

Growth is good for business, but it can be difficult on the IT group. When the crunch comes, many IT administrators turn to two familiar faces: Oracle and Microsoft.

"Our business has witnessed phenomenal growth in the past few years," says Jason Lin, assistant vice president, Application Integration and Architecture, at Ohio Savings Bank, in Cleveland, Ohio. "As a result of our dramatic growth, our IT requirements have grown rapidly as well—particularly in our wholesale mortgage business, in which we buy loans from correspondents and brokers and sell them to investors."

Like many other companies, Ohio Savings Bank decided to meet these needs by choosing what it considered the optimal products for each part of the solution—a combination of Oracle and Microsoft tools.

"We've built a mission-critical application to support the buying and selling of mortgages that runs 24/7 and is employed by more than 20,000 internal and external users such as mortgage agencies and brokerage firms," says Lin. "Because it's a mission-critical application, we decided to use Oracle Database for our back-end data storage in conjunction with our Microsoft front-end and middle tiers."

This application, Ohio Savings Bank's largest .NET/Oracle application, was deployed in November 2004. Ohio Savings Bank has several major applications across four lines of business—mortgage banking, construction lending, retail banking, and indirect auto lending—using both Oracle and Microsoft platforms.

"We feel that it's easy to find .NET or Visual Basic [VB] developers on the market because a lot of people are familiar with Windows development tools," says Lin. "But on the back end, we believe that Oracle's products have a lot of credibility and a good reputation in the market, so with Microsoft and Oracle we've picked the best of both worlds. And Oracle Data Provider for .NET [ODP.NET] provides the bridge to marry those two worlds happily."

For two worlds that have not always seemed compatible, that's a big statement and perhaps a good reason to reevaluate where things between Oracle and Microsoft stand.

"Oracle offers Windows customers the opportunity to use existing development skills with Oracle Database 10g and take the element of risk out of their deployment platform. Developers can take full advantage of the power of Oracle Database 10g, the availability and scalability of Oracle Real Application Clusters [Oracle RAC], and security features such as transparent data encryption," says Willie Hardie, vice president of Database Product Marketing at Oracle. "By integrating their Windows applications with Oracle Database 10g, our customers have a choice of deployment platforms."

A Powerful Combination with a Deep Connection

"Oracle has a long history of supporting Windows. From Windows NT's initial release in 1993 to .NET today, Oracle has supported all of Microsoft platforms early on," says Alex Keh, principal product manager, Windows and .NET Development, at Oracle.

That connection, despite some ups and downs, is stronger than ever. Oracle has made long-term commitments to partnering with Microsoft. From its side, Microsoft sees significant value in working cooperatively with Oracle when it comes to addressing customer needs. "The relationship is important to our customers, who expect reputable technology suppliers to be able to work well with one another. To that end, we do not let our areas of competition get in the way of the areas in which we can bring a great combined offering to market," says John Borozan, group product manager, Windows Server, at Microsoft. "A 64-bit version of Oracle Database 10g on Windows is a great example; we have customers that want to run that configuration, and we are pleased to offer them a solid solution stack for that purpose."

snapSHOTS Ohio Savings Bank Location: Cleveland, Ohio Size: Nearly US$13 billion in assets Oracle Products: Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition, Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Reports, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Data Provider for .NET Ziraat Bank Location: Istanbul, Turkey Size: 20,000 employees Oracle Products: Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Partitioning, Oracle Data Provider for .NET

An important part of Oracle's support for Windows is enabling customers to take advantage of the latest Microsoft (and Oracle) functionality as rapidly as possible. "Oracle supports Microsoft service pack and operating system releases on the day they're released, in addition to enabling Oracle Database users to take advantage of new Windows and .NET functionality," says Keh. "We're committed to making sure that .NET users get the most out of Oracle Database."

For example, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 supports new load balancing and fast connection failover features through .NET, allowing an organization's .NET middle tier to take advantage of the connection pool in .NET so it can be optimized for Oracle RAC. New fast connection failover capabilities in Oracle Database 10g Release 2 automatically tell ODP.NET that a server has gone down or has bad connections that need to be cleaned up.

"I think that Oracle is perceived as having a significant advantage when it comes to running big mission-critical enterprise applications, so lots of companies with those needs deploy those types of applications on Oracle databases instead of on Microsoft SQL Server, but still need to connect to Oracle databases from Microsoft Windows or .NET environments," says Derek Ferguson, editor-in-chief of .NET Developers Journal.

The combination of Oracle and Windows is also appealing to independent software vendors (ISVs) and smaller organizations. "ISVs that develop applications using Oracle technology have a choice of platforms to deploy on—Windows is an obvious choice for many of them because there's demand coming from their customers," says Oracle's Hardie. "And Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One on Windows is proving to be very popular among our small and medium-size business customers."

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As more Windows-oriented organizations migrate and integrate their .NET applications, Oracle has continued to aggressively enable .NET support through three primary features.

First, ODP.NET gives Windows developers access from .NET application servers and .NET stored procedures to Oracle Database. It is fully compliant with Microsoft's ADO.NET specification and provides access to Oracle's advanced features, such as Oracle RAC and XML DB.

Second, Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET is a design-time GUI that plugs into Microsoft Visual Studio, allowing users to browse the database schema, look at tables, change data, view stored procedures, modify them, and run them. "Visual Studio developer tools have many of the design-time features developers need to build .NET applications against an Oracle database," says Keh.

Finally, Oracle Database Extensions for .NET allow .NET programmers to run .NET code as stored procedures in the database, making it easier for them to write stored procedures. "In Oracle Database 10g Release 2, we included support for Microsoft's common language runtime, so that Windows developers can write stored procedures in the language of their choice and deploy them into the Oracle database," says Hardie.

Best of all, this technology is free for Oracle customers. "The .NET tools and data provider are free. They're part of Oracle's client stack, so customers can just go to OTN's .NET Developer Center home page and download whatever they need," notes Keh.

But .NET isn't the end of the story of how Oracle and Microsoft work together. Oracle products also integrate with other Microsoft technologies, such as Active Directory. "Oracle databases support single sign-on with Active Directory so that users have to log in only once when accessing Oracle and Active Directory. In addition, Identity Management in Oracle Application Server allows administrators to easily manage and provision users between Oracle and Active Directory," says Keh. "Administrators can employ Oracle Identity Management at the enterprise level to synchronize with multiple instances of Active Directory at the departmental level."

Many Oracle customers are also deploying Oracle applications, databases, and middleware capabilities on Windows servers. "Windows is a popular platform with our customers. It's important that we continue not just to support Windows, but also to offer platform choices," says Hardie.

Even grid computing, long associated with running clustered servers on Linux servers, has become a strong, viable option for Microsoft-oriented solutions, according to Hardie. "Companies are clustering small servers to scale out their systems. You can do that on the Windows or Linux platform," says Hardie. "So customers with Windows-oriented skills can run Oracle Database 10g on the Windows platform; take advantage of clustering; and get the benefits of higher availability, better data security, and increased scalability."

Oracle plans strong ongoing support for Microsoft as well, such as additional capabilities for new ADO.NET 2.0 features as Microsoft releases them, and support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Investing in the Future: Ohio Savings Bank

Oracle's ODP.NET functionality is a critical part of the Ohio Savings Bank implementation. According to Lin, Ohio Savings Bank originally used Microsoft's ODBC driver for connecting with its Oracle database, but found Oracle's ODP.NET to be a better solution for its needs. "I think Oracle's ODP.NET is more powerful and robust," says Lin. "For example, it used to be hard to take advantage of new Oracle Database features quickly, but we were able to take advantage of Oracle Database 10g Release 2 features quickly, because Oracle also released an updated ODP.NET version around the same time."

Taking advantage of new database features was particularly important for Ohio Savings Bank. For example, it decided to use XML throughout its new applications for everything from passing data back and forth to vendor interfaces. The company needed a data access mechanism from the Microsoft development environment that would easily and flexibly support XML. "Without ODP.NET and the Oracle native provider for the .NET environment, things would be more difficult, because the Microsoft ODBC provider does not support all the features or power that the Oracle back end offers," says Lin.

The View from Redmond "Although we're competitors on some levels, Oracle and Microsoft are partners at the platform level," says Bruce Burns, senior director, Technical Diplomacy, at Microsoft. "We work very closely with Oracle to ensure that its applications run extremely well on the Microsoft platform." According to Burns, the proof of that collaboration is that Oracle Database has been a showcase application for new versions of the Windows platform, including being the first relational database on Windows NT and a showcase more recently for 64-bit processor support on AMD- and Intel-based architectures. "If you look closely, you will find that a lot of great collaborative technical work is going on between the two companies," says Burns. "We're happy to have Oracle as a platform partner, ensuring great interoperability for our mutual customers." That vision is reinforced by Oracle. "Windows is a key platform for Oracle applications. Making sure our applications run well on Windows platforms is very important to Oracle and our customers," says Terri Noyes, senior director, Oracle Applications Platform Management. "In fact, Oracle products such as our enterprise applications are used by Microsoft to test new releases of its operating system." A good example of this collaboration is Microsoft's leveraging of Oracle products in the testing of Windows Server 2003. "We use Oracle applications to test Windows throughout the development process to ensure the best-possible customer experience. Where problems arise, Microsoft engineers and Oracle engineers collaborate to work through the issues," says John Borozan, group product manager, Windows Server, at Microsoft. "Oracle Database's proven scalability also makes it good for testing and developing Windows scalability: As we worked on breakthrough performance and scalability for the release of Windows Server 2003, we tested Oracle Database running on Windows to ensure that we had strong scalability all the way up to 64-way systems."

Ohio Savings Bank also used ODP.NET for connection pooling, a feature that is relatively easy to use, simple to implement, and flexible. Lin recommends that organizations allocate some testing time, though, because ODP.NET connection pooling has several parameters. "You want to find the best combination of parameters that works for you. I would strongly recommend load testing if the application has a lot of users or is mission-critical."

Ohio Savings Bank built a data access foundation for accessing its Oracle database from its .NET environment. The foundation maps the Microsoft .NET datatypes to Oracle's ODP.NET datatypes.

Keeping Management Costs Down The cost of developing and deploying an application is small compared to its maintenance and management costs. Experts say that more than 35 percent of IT operational budgets are spent on unplanned downtime due in part to human error. Managing multiple products from different vendors can take a big toll on your IT budget—and end-user satisfaction. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a single management console with new plug-ins that enable management of popular Microsoft products, including SQL Server 2000, .NET Framework, BizTalk Server 2004, Application Center 2000, ISA Server 2004, Commerce Server 2002, and Active Directory. The plug-ins automatically inherit Oracle Enterprise Manager's monitoring and management features, such as alerts, policies, blackouts, templates, groups or systems, configuration management, and enterprise reporting. Administrators can use the configuration management features to track configuration changes, compare configurations between deployments, and enforce standardization through policy management.

"We built what we call the OSB Foundation, which, in addition to taking care of error handling, security, and caching, encapsulates all the data access and nitty-gritty into a data access layer," says Lin. "And we had to do it only once," he adds. "We could specify how to retrieve XML, fetch multiple reference cursors, save data, do transactions, access Oracle back ends by using ODP.NET, and [do] everything else we needed to do that relates to data. It really makes life easy for developers. By creating a data access library or foundation, you can not only improve productivity but also create more-robust code. In addition, if you have any problems accessing Oracle data through ODP.NET, by correcting it in one single place, you fix it in all."

With its common foundation for data access, Ohio Savings Bank has gained greater efficiencies and reduced its costs. "Once you've written the data access code, everyone just uses it," says Lin. "You don't have to write it this way for one application and that way for another. We have a variety of applications—everything from our mortgage application and retail APEX application to our retail online banking application—that are all using our common foundation for data access. It's a more efficient way to develop applications. At Ohio Savings Bank you cannot access Oracle data without going through ODP.NET and the common foundation."

"Oracle's support for Windows is extremely important to us. I think that Oracle's strategy for supporting Windows is a big win. If we have any problems with our Microsoft-to-Oracle connectivity through ODP.NET, we talk to Oracle and they fix it for us. Oracle support has been very good," says Lin. "From a business perspective, it's been an advantage for us to be able to use Windows and Oracle products together with ODP.NET."

Optimizing Performance: Ziraat Bank

Ziraat Bank is the oldest and biggest bank in Turkey, with more than 20,000 employees, 1,200 branches, and 1,500 ATM machines. In addition to conducting traditional banking operations, Ziraat is responsible for some governmental operations, such as making payments to retired employees—in fact, more than six million people get their wages from Ziraat Bank each month.

Three years ago, Ziraat set up Fintek Financial Technology (www.fintek.com.tr) to provide IT services and develop a new core banking application. After almost two years of intense system and software development, the application, called Finart, became operational.

Fintek changed the underlying infrastructure to a three-tier architecture with a Microsoft .NET infrastructure in the front office and middle tiers and an Oracle Database 10g RAC grid computing solution for the database tier.

"At the beginning of the project, we had concerns about integrating solutions from two vendors, but Oracle's ODP.NET solution seamlessly integrated Oracle with the .NET environment," says Ali Engin Eroglu, managing coordinator at Fintek. Now those concerns have been allayed.

A Paradigm Shift, Oracle, 64-Bit Windows, and Grid Windows customers who have wanted to run larger Oracle databases or deployments have had some scalability restrictions because of Windows' 32-bit memory space. No more. "One of the challenges we've seen in the database tier in the past is the ability to scale on the Windows platform. The problem was the 32-bit memory issue," says TJ Lamphier, senior global alliances manager at Dell. "That's significantly gone away with the EM64T processor and Microsoft's 64-bit Windows 2003 OS. It'll be a huge change for organizations that want to run Oracle on Windows in the data center. I think it's a paradigm shift." It's a paradigm shift that will have positive effects for customers who want high-performance solutions. "One of the most compelling reasons to move to 64-bit computing is for databases and business applications; therefore, we have partnered closely with Oracle to ensure that customers get a strong 64-bit solution stack for those workloads," says John Borozan, group product manager, Windows Server, at Microsoft. "For example, Oracle's database was one of the first 64-bit applications available for Windows on Itanium and posted impressive performance results on a 16-way Unisys ES7000." As a close Oracle and Microsoft partner, Dell provides validated systems that include the servers (including Dell's PowerEdge 6850s and 2850s running Windows 2003 Enterprise, 64-bit edition), network, and storage to run Oracle databases and middle-tier products such as Oracle Fusion Middleware. Connecting different types of systems and products from different vendors usually requires some software magic, and for Dell that means using Oracle Fusion Middleware. "We've also done a lot of work with Oracle Fusion Middleware and really like the message that these products can link multiple or different pieces of applications," Lamphier says. "There's a heterogeneous mixture of development and software platforms in most IT organizations, and we'd like to be viewed as delivering the reference architecture for enabling Oracle Fusion Middleware, which in turn will provide our customers access to either the .NET or Java development environment (or both, if they choose). We think that the power of Oracle and the power of Dell on Windows can do that." Another aspect of Dell's use of Oracle and Windows to help customers reduce computing costs is through Oracle's grid architecture. "Many companies want to reduce the cost of their legacy SMP infrastructures and move to technologies such as Oracle RAC and grid computing on Dell two- and four-way servers. They have skill sets centered on Microsoft Windows and don't want to move to a third OS in their data center—Linux—to gain lower costs on Oracle's highly available grid infrastructure," says Lamphier. "With Oracle Database 10g on Windows, you can have the best of both worlds—you can keep your skill sets the same, in some cases consolidating on a single OS, and still gain the advantages of grid architecture and Fusion Middleware while reducing your hardware infrastructure cost." But grid computing—especially when deployed on industry-standard components—isn't just for the largest or most experienced companies anymore. "We've taken an enterprise technology with Oracle Database 10g, industry-standard servers, and industry-standard operating systems such as Windows; clustered them; and given the common IT shop the ability to easily get and deploy an architecture previously affordable and manageable only by Fortune 100 companies," says Lamphier. "Now, even a small company can afford Oracle Real Application Clusters on Windows, giving them all the benefits of high performance, high availability, and scalability on demand. It becomes a pay-as-you-grow concept that's beautifully tied together by Oracle Database 10g."

"It's a completely reliable and scalable architecture," says Eroglu. "We serve more than 250,000 Ziraat Bank customers per hour using it. It's a reliable, scalable, and flexible solution." Fintek designed the solution on a service-oriented architecture, with six nodes of Unisys Data Center on 8 CPUs of IA64 running Oracle Database 10g RAC on the back end and Microsoft servers and .NET on the front end.

Before consolidating all of its data into a single clustered Oracle database back end, Ziraat had problems with the reliability and timeliness of the data coming into its previous, distributed database architecture. "Before the project, we were managing more than 1,200 databases at each office and had to do 1,200 backups every night," says Eroglu. "Now we can access data in real time. The reporting is also real-time, and we have to do only one backup. We have one end-of-night operation and only one database to manage."

Ziraat used Oracle Partitioning to divide its tables into partitions—per branch and per date. "With this design, we have optimized our data and performance. Oracle Real Application Clusters and data partitioning boost performance," says Eroglu.

In addition, Ziraat is impressed with the benefits of its grid computing implementation. "We thought grid computing was an excellent idea, but we wondered if it really worked only on papers and in presentations," says Eroglu. "After some benchmarking and testing, though, we saw that it was real. Now that we've used it, we've seen that it lowers the total cost of ownership, improves availability, and is very flexible. My advice to other companies is to test it, benchmark it, and adopt it."

Oracle on Apple: Your Grid on Macs        By Jeff Erickson The Oracle/Apple Computer relationship is in a renaissance. In 2004 Oracle chose Apple Xserve RAIDs to store Oracle Collaboration Suite data for 30,000-plus employees. In 2005 the Oracle and Apple development teams ported and certified Oracle Database 10g and Oracle JDeveloper 10g on Mac OS X. Both companies have committed 24/7 support to the partnership. "We see Apple as a well-supported, low-cost UNIX on really high-performance, reliable hardware, and that's good for our customers," says Tim Hoechst, Oracle's senior vice president of Public Sector Sales. Apple, which touts its Xserve G5 as a powerful 1U server, ideal for scale-out grid computing, sees its partnership with Oracle as a huge opportunity. Oracle RAC is fully supported on OS X for Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition configurations, and Xserve-based grids are proliferating. "We're tracking Oracle on Xserve grids in biotech, utilities, enterprise, finance, Web technologies, and lots in education and government," says Adele Evans, senior manager of Oracle Server Technology Partnerships. "The feedback we're getting is that the performance is fantastic." Dan Morgan, whose company, ATS, Inc., helps clients build Oracle RAC systems to support Oracle Database, agrees. "Apple designed its Xserve blades with dual 1.5-GHz buses to handle terabytes of high-definition video for core Macintosh customers such as movie studios and ad agencies," Morgan explains, "so when we put a database on top, it screams."

Providing Options for Customers

Despite what has sometimes been less-than-positive press coverage of the relationship between the two companies, both Oracle and Microsoft have been working to provide customers with deeper and broader integrations between their products and easier ways to leverage them. In 2004, Oracle announced that it would participate as a premier-level partner in the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner program, which benefits Oracle, Microsoft, and their customers. As a program member, Oracle provides even tighter integration between Oracle Database and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET—a big win for developers building Oracle applications on the Microsoft Windows platform.

Next Steps VISIT .NET Developer Center Windows Technology Center LEARN more about Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Extensions Exchange Oracle Database 10g

"More than anything else, customers need Oracle and Microsoft to continue collaborating on product development and testing. This takes the guesswork out of the equation for customers; if they so desire, they can deploy Oracle products on Windows and be confident of getting an enterprise-class experience," says Microsoft's Borozan.

"For example, one of the most compelling recent developments has been the emergence of 64-bit Oracle Database 10g running on Windows Server 2003 64-bit Editions. Most customers now realize the compelling price/performance advantages of 64-bit processors, but may not know that they can exploit that power with a combination of Oracle technology and Windows. One way or another, 64-bit hardware is clearly the way of the future; already the majority of new server shipments contain 64-bit processors. Now we'll start to see the other shoe drop: Increasingly, customers will choose the 64-bit versions of Windows and Windows-based applications over their 32-bit counterparts," Borozan says.

From a customer's perspective, close collaboration between Oracle and Microsoft results in better products, more choice, and better and more-efficient solutions. "Many times when we go to customers and talk with them about our support for Microsoft products—from .NET to Active Directory to Visual Studio—they're surprised," says Santanu Datta, senior director of Server Technologies at Oracle. "Working closely with the Microsoft platform and products is very important to Oracle. We want to provide customers with the option to use Windows, run either the database or the application server on it, and use either .NET or J2EE. We provide that close integration in all the environments to make sure that customers can choose whatever technology is the best fit."