Oracle Takes Aim at the Mobile Work Force

Oracle has released the newest installment in its Database Lite 10g product line, which is intended to help the mobile work force securely exchange data with a corporate database.

Comprised of a mobile server and a mobile relational database, the latest release, Oracle Database Lite 10g Release 3, features automatic synchronization and support for a broader range of platforms. The product has added client database platform support for Windows Mobile 5, Windows CE Standard SDK 5.0 and Java Database Connectivity support for the Symbian platform. It also now supports two additional languages for stored procedures, C++ and C#/.NET, as well as Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J) for the WebToGo Java development environment.

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But customers may find the biggest change to be in how data is synchronized.

"In the old version of the product, synchronization was always user-initiated," said Olaf van der Geest, director of Oracle Database Lite Development, in an interview with eWEEK. "In the new version, what we have done is, instead of having the synch be user-initiated, it is automatically triggered."

Van der Geest explained that users can set parameters for when synchronization will happen, such as whenever new data is put on the device or when the device enters the network, for example. The synchronization will happen in the background, and for the first time can be initiated from the server side as well.

"If you have new data on the server and want to get that to a particular user, you no longer have to wait for the user to say, Hey, Im going to synchronize my data," van der Geest said. "Instead, we have a way of getting that data to the device automatically."

Bob Bramski, CIO and vice president at DS Waters of America, a bottle water company based in Georgia, said the extended platform support of Release 3 will be helpful as his company expands.

Currently, said Bramski in a statement, the company runs Oracle Database Lite on more than 1,000 routes, holding approximately 30MB of data with a failure rate of less than 0.5 percent. He said Release 3 "will significantly help as we grow to the next generation of handheld devices supporting more than 2,000 routes."

Oracle Database Lite 10g Release 3 is available immediately for $20,000 per processor for the mobile server with unlimited use of the mobile database.

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