Oracle: 11g Is Good for Developers,Too

Oracles new 11g database is not only a boon for database administrators, but also for developers, said the database giant.

Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., announced its Oracle 11g database product at a launch event in New York on July 11, touting its benefits for users and DBAs. But the product also features a host of new capabilities for developers to build applications in the Java and .Net environments and across dynamic languages, the company said.

Two new tools that see their first release with Oracle 11g. One is the SQL Developer, which is an integrated development environment for that enables developers to use a graphical user interface tool for better efficiency and productivity, said Mike Hichwa, vice president of software development at Oracle. Before SQL Developer, Oracle had its SQL Plus tool for querying, defining and controlling data. But SQL Plus, which Oracle will continue to provide, is a character mode only tool.

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"This has been a customer favorite and a popular download," Hichwa said. Moreover, SQL Developer also supports migrations, such as those from MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.

The other new tool in Oracle 11g is Application Express, a new database tool for building Web applications.

"The Oracle database ships with a native Web-based development tool out of the box," Hichwa said. "All the development can be done with a Web browser, so you dont need to use any client software."

Other developer-centric features include an increase in performance for accessing large objects or LOBs. Oracle also has included a new server-side result set cache and client-side result set cache, as well as a PL/SQL result set cache to enable developers to access cached data.

Christian Shay, product manager in the .NET and Windows group at Oracle, said that as a result of a close partnership with Microsoft, "our goal is to make sure Microsoft developers can take advantage of Oracle" from the Visual Studio development platform. Oracle provides its Oracle Developer Tools for .Net, which is a tightly integrated add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2003.

The plug-in gives developers the ability to browse and edit schema output and generate .net code to access Oracle by simply dragging and dropping components, Shay said. The product has a focus on code generation and ASP.NET development. It also features a PL/SQL editor/debugger that takes advantage of the Visual Studio debugger.

Oracle expects Database 11g to set the database bar. Click here to read more.

"You can step directly from .Net code that calls into Oracle and then step into PL/SQL code," Shay said.

Oracle also provides Oracle Data provider for .Net, which enables native high-performance data access to the Oracle database from any .Net language. This technology supports Microsofts ADO.NET 2.0.

David Gambino, director of product management at Oracle, said other features that will benefit developers include database resident connection pooling, support for PHP through a relationship with Zend, support for real native PL/SQL compilation, a PL/SQL hierarchical profiler, a new JIT (just-in-time) compiler for faster Java performance in the database, and a set of JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) drivers and support for Java SE 6, JDBC 4.0 and JMX (Java Management Extensions).

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