APPLICATIONS

Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Database 10g Release 2, which delivers a more robust implementation of the Oracle Database 10g Release 1 feature set. The new release adds compelling improvements in performance, availability, manageability and security to assist customers and partners in achieving a higher quality of service, while reducing the cost and complexity of information management. Oracle Database 10g is the only database designed for grid computing. "Oracle sets the bar for relational databases while our competitors struggle to deliver basic functionality in a timely manner," said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle. "Oracle Database 10g Release 2 builds upon the grid capabilities delivered in Release 1, while introducing significant new security capabilities. It is a comprehensive and integrated product designed to deliver the highest quality of service at the lowest cost." Since its introduction in February 2004, Oracle Database 10g has been adopted by more than 40,000 customers and by more than 15,000 partners. The most recent Gartner, IDC and Morgan Stanley database market surveys all agree that Oracle continues to increase its database market share as companies realize the benefits of grid computing. These findings underscore the trend of more and more companies moving their database infrastructure to low-cost grids of industry standard storage and servers. Increased Grid Computing Capabilities Oracle Database 10g Release 2 delivers increased grid computing capabilities resulting in improved performance, higher application availability and even greater ease of management. Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) remains the only database technology on the market that lets customers turn a cluster of industry standard servers into a scaleable and fault-tolerant platform for running any database workload. With Release 2, RAC scalability is improved to support up to 100 servers in a RAC cluster. Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control is improved to simplify monitoring of the cluster interconnect and topology. Improved RAC load balancing enables more rapid response to changing server utilization patterns across a cluster. The new release also features an open Application Program Interface (API) for Oracle Clusterware to enable higher application availability. Enhanced Oracle Automatic Storage Management capabilities allow for easier sharing of storage resources in a grid environment. Enhanced Performance and High Availability Oracle Database 10g Release 2 features new capabilities that deliver improved performance and availability, including: * New sorting techniques greatly enhance the performance of all sorting operations, such as queries and index creation, and eliminate the need for costly pre-load sort operations and related third-party software; and, * Oracle Data Guard's new automated capabilities enable failover to a standby database in seconds following a disaster, even in unattended environments. These capabilities, among others, enable customers to improve the availability and performance of their IT systems. Providing Greater Data Security Capabilities Over the last year, theft of insecure data in online databases and on backup tapes has become an increasing problem. Oracle Database 10g Release 2 adds to its existing powerful security mechanisms with new forms of data encryption to better protect data against such theft. Transparent Data Encryption enables customers to encrypt critical database data on disk, for example, credit card numbers or Social Security numbers, without the need to rewrite the applications that access the data. The feature is completely application transparent and is expected to help customers address data theft and regulatory compliance issues. Also introduced with Release 2 of Oracle Database 10g is the ability to encrypt database data stored in backups either on disk or on tape. Oracle Secure Backup is a new automated backup-to-tape management system that provides a lower cost alternative to complex backup products. It provides the highest performance backup for an Oracle database and supports encryption of the backups on tape. It can be used with Oracle Database 10g, as well as earlier releases of the Database, such as Oracle 9i. The existing Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) backup-to-disk feature has been enhanced to encrypt the backup data. Enhanced Database Manageability Oracle Database 10g Release 2 improves database administrative capabilities, including: * The collection of performance statistics directly from memory allowing the diagnosis of slow or non-respondent environments; * Greater awareness of the overall systems' performance in Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor helping to detect and diagnose a wider range of performance problems; and, * Automatic Workload Repository comparison reports provide valuable intelligence for quick performance troubleshooting. New Application Development Features Oracle Database 10g Release 2 offers several new features that increase support for application developers. The new features include: * The industry's first commercial support for the W3C XML Query standard for access to XML data; * Improved Microsoft Windows support via stored procedures implemented in the Common Language Runtime (CLR); and, * Augmented development functionality for Oracle HTML DB, the rapid Web application development tool for Oracle Database. Availability, Packaging and Pricing All editions (Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition and Standard Edition One) of Oracle Database 10g Release 2 are generally available on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 operating system. The software is available for download at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/oracle10g/index.html. Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is scheduled to become available on all supported Linux, UNIX and Windows platforms over the next 30-90 days. Transparent Data Encryption and encryption of RMAN backups to disk are included in the Oracle Advanced Security option ($10,000 per processor) to the Enterprise Edition of Oracle Database.