Oracle 11g New Release: Frugality

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Oracle today took the wraps off release 2 of its 11g database, an update that aims to capitalize on enterprises’ focus on cost-cutting.

In contrast, the initial 11g database release in 2007 concentrated on innovation.

The change is in tune with the times, according to Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and industry researcher IDC.

“As organizations face exponential information growth and complexity throughout the data center, they are seeking to minimize IT costs and increase administrative efficiencies,” Carl Olofson, IDC research vice president, said in a statement.

“Oracle Database 11g Release 2 features enhancements to grid computing, storage management and administration capabilities that are designed to help users achieve greater resource utilization of their information management systems while making the related system infrastructure and storage easier to
manage and more affordable,” Olofson added.

Features focus on savings

The new release improves storage use, speeds queries by up to 10 times, and on the whole doubles the productivity of Oracle DBA employees, Oracle said.

The new release includes Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). This feature makes it easier to consolidate servers onto grids, which the company claims can reduce costs by up to five times.

An additional optional feature, Oracle RAC One Node, is designed for databases that are not mission-critical and provides many of the features of RAC, Oracle said.

The company said it has made it easier to use lower-cost storage and has improved compression by between two and four times. The company added that with release 2, Oracle Automatic Storage Management supports a general-purpose file management system, also making it easier to use cheaper storage.

The company claims that with release 2, servers and other resources can be employed while also serving as a backup for other resources. This feature is designed to prevent “servers and storage from sitting idle waiting for failures,” the company said.

A new feature, Edition-based Redefinition, allows upgrades to happen in real time, obviating the need for a separate upgrade environment, Oracle claimed.

“Our customers want features that offer better performance and availability, lower IT costs and ways to deliver better information to their business users,” Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle senior vice president of server technologies, said in a statement.

Partners and Open Calais

Oracle’s partners like Fujitsu and HP expressed enthusiasm for the new product.

“Oracle Database 11g Release 2 with its enhanced query caching, parallelization and offloading of query processing to HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers provides the extreme performance our customers require,” Mike Crowsen, HP vice president for the Oracle corporate alliance, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, OpenCalais, the semantic metadata service sponsored by Thomson Reuters, announced that the company’s semantic search technologies have been integrated into Oracle Database 11g release 2.

“With the new integration, the OpenCalais service can be called directly by Oracle Spatial 11g, an option for Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition that delivers an advanced semantic data management capability not found in any other commercial or open source database,” the company said.

“The semantic metadata provided by OpenCalais helps users perform better, more comprehensive searches for documents of interest stored in Oracle Database,” it said. “By populating the semantic index in Oracle Database, it is now possible to go beyond keyword searches to find documents that are conceptually relevant to the user’s search.”

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.