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SAN FRANCISCO—While most customers are still contending with the intricacies of Oracle Database 10g, company officials told attendees of its OpenWorld show Oct. 23 that it was ready to launch the beta test version of the next generation Database 11g.
Speed and performance will be the hallmark of the 11g, said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president for server technologies.
The new database will run fast enough so that for the first time it will beat specialized filed systems for transferring large blocks of data.
Rozwat displayed test results that showed that the 11g beta is capable of transferring 1GB in just under 9 seconds compared to 12 seconds for a file system.
This level of performance is important to customers who are demanding instant access to data, Rozwat said.
“If systems cant perform fast enough and deliver information in real time, we are in real trouble,” Rozwat said.
The new version will also provide additional features for supporting and provisioning Grid systems, he said.
Rozwat said he believed that 11g will add impetus to the adoption rate for Grid computing.
The new version will also include compression technology that should reduce data storage requirements by up as much as two-thirds, Rozwat said.
Oracles first shipped its current database generation, 10g, in February 2004. There have been several upgrades over the past two years.
However, Oracle customers are notorious for sticking with older versions for years after the company has released later generations.
Customers will typically acquire the latest database generation for new corporate database applications and implementation rather than choose to upgrade existing implementations.
Oracles Oct. 9 acquisition of data integration technology developer Sunopsis will augment the data warehousing capabilities of 11g and Oracles Fusion Middleware, Rozwat said.
Sunopsis has developed Extract, Load, Transform data integration technology that makes it easier to build data warehouses that combine data from multiple sources, including non-Oracle databases, such as IBM DB2 and Microsofts SQL Server, he said.
Oracle also plans to integrate the Sunopsis technology with its service-oriented architecture, Business Intelligence and Master Data Management applications.
Rozwat also demonstrated how it was integrating Siebel Systems business intelligence technology into its Fusion architecture.
While Oracle has long marketed it own business intelligence applications, it acquired additional BI capabilities when it acquired Siebel Systems, a developer of customer relationship management software based in San Mateo, Calif., in late 2005.
Working over the past six months to integrate it into Fusion architecture, the Siebel BI technology allows users to build highly personalized and highly customizable data views, Rozwat said.
“You can choose the way you want to view data,” he said, by building interactive charts or instantly switch back to view different data tables.
Rozwat also demonstrated how Oracle is integrating maps into business intelligence and interactive database reports.
For example, users can build sales reports that map the locations of hot sales leads and show the proximity of satisfied customers that can serve as references.
Customer can also build sales dashboards that use interactive maps as an interface that is linked to a wide range of data, showing sales leads in different geographic districts, their status and by sales representatives performance.
Rozwat also talked up the importance of the newly shipped Oracle Content Database and Oracle Records database for helping corporations organize the huge mass of documents and information stacked in the dark corners of their offices.
This information isnt just in the form of paper documents, he noted. Increasingly it can be in the form of video, voice, e-mails, instant messages, maps, oil and gas deposit surveys, medical images and a host of different types of records.
For example, he noted that video archive and search company YouTube, which Google recently acquired for $2.5 billion, had amassed a 45TB video archive in little more than a year. That archive is continuing to grow at about 20 percent a month.
Managing such a huge volume of information that represents a strategic corporate asset is what the Oracle content and records databases were developed for.
The databases, which were released on Sept. 20, allow enterprises to store, retrieve and share many different types of documents and files.
They were developed as part of Oracles content management platform, which had been code-named Tsunami.
The databases allow enterprises to organize and access large masses of data “at the individual level, the group level and the corporate level,” Rozwat said.