Oracle introduces Oracle Database 10g

News release:

Oracle Introduces Oracle Database 10g - The First Database Designed to Power Enterprise Grids

+++New Management, Storage and Cluster Automation Provides Immediate Efficiencies and Clear Roadmap to Enterprise Grid Computing

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Sep. 8, 2003 - ( http://www.oracle.com/tellmemore/?2287166) Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL), the world's largest enterprise software company, has announced Oracle Database 10g, new software designed to help customers and partners achieve the highest levels of efficiency from their Information Technology (IT) investments, including hardware, software and, most importantly, labor. Oracle Database 10g relieves IT professionals from time-consuming, repetitive administrative work enabling them to focus more on solving business problems. Oracle today also announced Oracle Application Server 10g and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g (see separate press releases). Together, they comprise Oracle Grid Computing, the first integrated grid infrastructure software introduced to the market.

"While IT systems have become more strategic and integral to the core business, they also have become more complex, and more difficult and costly to manage," said Carl Olofson, program director for information and data management software research at IDC. "Oracle Database 10g represents a great stride forward, introducing new self-managing features that help automate statistics collection, instance tuning, memory tuning, and more. Helping customers automate daily, routine administrative tasks greatly reduces the management burden, and that can translate into substantial cost savings and more effective database administration."

Traditional IT infrastructures leave organisations with "islands" of computing resources and software that are difficult to integrate and manage. Systems were designed to handle peak loads that might occur once per quarter or per year. As a result, IT infrastructures often became very inefficient. Oracle Grid Computing addresses this business challenge by helping customers reduce the time, labor and cost of IT operations by pooling industry standard servers and storage into an adaptable infrastructure that can meet changing business demands.

Oracle Grid Computing builds on 10 years of grid technology development in academia and extends it to enterprise customers. Oracle grids run real packaged applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, and other ISV applications from vendors such as PeopleSoft and SAP. Because enterprise grid computing requires simplified storage management, transparent server clustering, and highly automated software, Oracle Grid Computing takes customers and partners a giant step toward making utility computing a reality.

+++Automatic Management and Database Control

Enterprise grid computing will help customers quickly and inexpensively build large-scale computing capacity from inexpensive, standardised components such as clusters of server blades and rack-mounted storage. New levels of management automation are required to make this feasible. To meet these new requirements, Oracle Database 10g introduces advanced self-management capabilities and a new Web-based console called Database Control.

Based on Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, Database Control provides a graphical diagnostic window into the database as it operates. Administrators can proactively monitor the database and quickly receive alerts and advice to ensure optimal performance and reliability. Database Control can even identify poorly written application code, suggest better code and automatically tune the database to provide optimal performance. In addition, the self-management capabilities of Oracle Database 10g eliminate complex, repetitive tasks such as performance diagnostics, application tuning and memory management. The new software includes a self-diagnostic engine that automatically identifies any performance or operational problems and recommends corrective action. These capabilities provide immediate relief for IT staff as well as long term benefits for building enterprise grids.

"Oracle Database 10g will provide significant new value in the manageability area because it frees up our database administrators from day-to-day operations," said Arvind Gidwani, manager IT, Qualcomm. "A good example of this is the Flashback Database feature, which gives us the ability to look back in time at our data without having to perform a recovery operation. This is a major time and money saver for us. With less time required to monitor and manage the database, more of the IT department's time can be dedicated to business processes."

+++Database Clustering Made Easy

At the heart of Oracle Grid Computing is its breakthrough database clustering technology, Oracle Real Application Clusters. With more than 550 customers in 44 countries in production, Oracle Real Application Clusters is the culmination of over 10 years of software development, and remains the only clustered database software that can run packaged applications unchanged as additional servers and storage are added to the cluster.

With the new Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g, deploying and managing database clusters as an enterprise grid is made far easier with the introduction of integrated clusterware. Integrated clusterware is a set of common clustering services built into Oracle Database 10g to simplify the creation and operation of database clusters. In the past, running Oracle Real Application Clusters on different platforms - UNIX, Linux, Windows - required detailed and technical knowledge of cluster operations for each platform. Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g now includes all the clustering software needed to easily install, configure and run clusters predictably and efficiently on all supported platforms.

Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g also introduces new cluster workload management software designed to shift computing capacity throughout the clustered database as business needs change. This new software will help customers run larger clusters of low-cost servers, such as server blades, to create enterprise grids.

"We like what we've seen with the direction Oracle is taking for enterprise grid computing," said Rick Brauen, senior manager, Database Services, Amazon.com. "The ability to manipulate and reallocate database workloads within a cluster based on the peaks and valleys of our normal business cycles will be invaluable to us in maximising our IT investments while meeting ever-increasing service level requirements."

+++Integrated Storage Management Eliminates Constant Storage Tuning

Oracle Database 10g also introduces Automatic Storage Management (ASM), new software designed to greatly simplify storage configuration and management for the database. ASM hides the underlying complexity of how the database deals with data files and storage subsystems. It also automatically distributes the storage workload to get the best possible system performance. ASM eliminates the need to constantly monitor storage systems for "hot spots" or performance bottlenecks that often slow down data processing.

ASM also eliminates the need for costly third-party volume management and file system software by completely automating database file and data storage. With ASM, customers can dramatically reduce data center complexity and system management costs. Oracle has worked with several industry storage leaders such as EMC, Hitachi, HP, Network Appliance and Xiotech to enable ASM to work seamlessly with their network attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) offerings (see related press release).

"Grid computing represents a significant new technology direction for the IT industry and Oracle is leading the way in how information and applications are delivered in this environment," said Charles Rozwat, executive vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle Corporation. "Oracle Database 10g is a major milestone in realising this grid vision while providing many immediate benefits to Oracle customers such as improved performance and lower management costs."

+++About Oracle Database 10g

Oracle Database 10g is designed to be effectively deployed on everything from small servers to the biggest SMP servers and from clusters to enterprise grids. It features automated tuning and management capabilities that make it easy and cost effective to operate. Its unique ability to natively manage all your data from traditional business information to OLAP, to XML documents, to spatial/location information make it the ideal choice to power Online Transaction Processing, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, and Content Management applications.

ENDS

+++About Oracle

Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

###

+++Trademarks

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.

© Scoop Media