Oracle Rdb Statement of Direction

Oracle Rdb enjoys phenomenal success in environments requiring the utmost in performance, reliability, availability and maintainability. Since Rdb became part of Oracle Corporation in late 1994, customers have benefited from a significant enhancement in its capabilities and unparalleled support for their most mission critical systems.

Rdb is one of the software industry’s most successful acquisition stories. While Rdb is now over 20 years old, over 50% of the code base is newly developed since becoming part of Oracle Corporation. This significant enhancement has enabled product successes which make Rdb a database of choice for high-throughput, critical database applications on OpenVMS systems. Oracle Rdb products today host a very significant portion of the world’s:

• Cellular telephone customer service and billing systems,
• Lotteries,
• Financial exchanges,
• Satellite Direct Broadcast Television systems,
• Integrated circuit manufacturing,
• And many other extremely high volume systems which absolutely cannot tolerate failure.

Oracle is quite proud of the contribution it has made to Rdb and the level of service that is available to Rdb customers. Not only is Rdb enhanced by the development investment Oracle has made, but it also benefits from being part of the Oracle family of products. Through an increasing emphasis on common technologies and product family standards, Rdb has been integrated into a broad selection of software for custom application development, multi-tier application deployment via internet technologies and even the Oracle database engine itself. Rdb further benefits from Oracle’s investment in quality support & consulting. As a result of all these contributions, Rdb is a successful business for Oracle Corporation.

Rdb Strengths

The success of Rdb can be primarily attributed to its technical strengths. Customers rely upon Rdb for:

• Very high performance to deliver extraordinary real-world throughput.
• Extremely high reliability, providing both data security and database uptime.
• Extremely high availability—requirements for scheduled maintenance downtime are minimal.
• Easy maintainability so changes can be made quickly.
• Low cost per transaction.

These technical strengths are enhanced by the significant investments Oracle Corporation has made in Rdb to integrate it into the large family of database products and development tools. Developers and end users are able to use common and widely acclaimed Oracle tools for application development, ad hoc queries, decision support and internet application deployment.

Rdb Future

Oracle’s plans for the future of Rdb are simple: Don’t change a successful formula.

This means we will maintain our relentless focus on quality and stability while enhancing the features and family compatibilities which our customers require to maximize the capabilities upon which their businesses depend.

Oracle Corporation’s commitment to Rdb and to Rdb customers is ongoing and open-ended. As we continue to enhance and support Rdb, we are guided by what our customers tell us they require. The Rdb Development team offers Rdb Technical Forums around the world where Rdb engineers and other acknowledged experts give detailed technical presentations about the latest features of Rdb and how to best deploy them. The Technical Forums and frequent customer visits and discussions provide critical feedback we use to set Rdb development priorities.

Integration with Oracle9i and Oracle 10g

The Oracle Rdb Team consists of extremely dedicated professionals who are a part of the overall database development group at Oracle Corporation. While Rdb engineers are working to enhance Rdb, they are working side-by-side with engineers working on Oracle 10g and other related database projects.

Oracle9i and Oracle 10g enjoy the dominant position among open-system databases and is the most popular database in the world. Because of this popularity, most Rdb customers also utilize the Oracle Database. Since joining Oracle, Rdb Engineering has pursued a strategy of making Rdb a full participant in the Oracle environment. One result of this approach has been that many other Oracle technologies—for eBusiness applications, data warehousing and custom application development—have become well integrated participants in Rdb customer environments. Beginning with the engineers and continuing to large customer installations, Oracle actively encourages this “cross pollination” of technologies. The result is a stronger set of products which meet a broader range of requirements and provide the Rdb customer with the choice of technologies to best meet their needs today and in the future.