Its Onward and Upward for a Refreshed Oracle - ' Many Customers Have Middleware ' (
Page 2 of 2 )
on Their Minds">
Brian Houest was in the same line. Houest, whos in the application development group for Goodyear, in Akron, Ohio, said R2s new tuning features are the thing that floats his boat, since Goodyears looking at some data warehouse tables that have surpassed half a billion rows.
Hes still running on 9i, but like so many, its getting time to move on up, he said—particularly given those scarily large databases.
Middleware is on peoples minds as well. I talked to one woman who was in the audience for Phillips keynote on Monday.
She said that she was seriously looking at Fusion Middleware, which Oracle has been hyping during the show.
The woman, whose name I didnt catch, said her company is running on expensive, proprietary middleware now.
Shed been playing around with Oracles HTML DB—Ive never heard of it being used for middleware, so perhaps she switched the conversation without my noticing—but complained that its just too control-dense.
Phillips outlines Project Fusion in depth during his keynote. Click here to read more.
Mendelsohn was surprised to hear that feedback when I chatted with him, given that HTML DB is geared to being a simple, easy-to-use, rapid development tool for building scalable and secure Web applications.
At any rate, Oracle on Wednesday announced the release of HTML DB 2.0, which promises to be even easier to use. It packs a wider range of capabilities for developing Web-based applications, designing SQLS queries without having to know SQL, and for editing SQL and PL/SQL within a Web browser.
Heres one last bit of input before the plane boards: I was hanging around the Demo booths on the show floor, waiting to get some feedback from a showgoer who was getting a demo of R2s Transparent Data Encryption.
This is one of the hottest new features of R2, security-wise, and Mendelsohn was pushing it as being just the thing for companies that have to deal with regulatory compliance in these days of identity theft and Sarbanes-Oxley.
I finally bumped into a DBA from a financial services company that has to deal with healthcare data, financial data and just about every other type of sensitive data when it comes to privacy and regulation.
This DBAs company is already running encryption, he said, but never mind regulations—its customers who want more, he told me.
What he likes about Transparent Data Encryption is that it requires no coding changes.
"Its another reason to go to 10g," he said. "Along with the performance and troubleshooting tools. Now I can use tools to go after data on the disk whether its corrupted or whatever. I dont know yet how the Oracle tool works at the lower level," and thats why he was waiting for a demo, he told me.
But from a DBA perspective, other types of encryption require a lot more application modification, a ton more maintenance and more performance problems, he said.
So in a nutshell: its onward and upward for most Oracle customers, to 10g R2. And fasten your belts to see who Oracle buys next.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest database news, reviews and analysis.
