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http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9004308
Vendor
expected to disclose info on '11g' upgrade at OpenWorld
Eric Lai
October 20,
2006 (IDG News Service) -- At its
OpenWorld conference in
Oracle declined
to comment this week about any new products it has in the works. But users and
analysts said they expect the next database release to include enhancements to
the software's grid computing, clustering and XML capabilities as well as
increased automation to ease database administration tasks for smaller
companies and new security features to protect against insider data theft.
Oracle released
a Beta 1 version of the software in September, said
Kaplan, a
senior consultant at Datalink Corp. in Chanhassen, Minn., who said he has seen
the 11g beta, declined to disclose specific information about its contents. But
he said the beta includes new features related to Oracle's Real Application
Clusters technology, its grid management and XML handling capabilities,
service-oriented architectures, security and the company's PL/SQL development
language. "There's a lot of exciting functionality," Kaplan said.
Unlike
Microsoft Corp., which went five years between database releases before
shipping SQL Server 2005 last fall, Oracle doesn't look like it will have
trouble meeting its usual three-year development cycle on new database
releases, said Donald Burleson, an Oracle technology consultant and author in
Kittrell, N.C. He expects the upgrade to be released sometime next year.
But Burleson
was less wowed by the plans for 11g than Kaplan was. He described the next
release as "a minor move up," with its most salient features from the
user standpoint likely to be in the area of simplifying database administration
tasks. "They're trying to make Oracle so simple a 12-year-old girl could
install it," Burleson said.
Oracle is
scheduled to hold two sessions on database futures at OpenWorld on Monday. Andy
Mendelsohn, the company's senior vice president of database technologies, will
lead a session entitled "The Future of Database Technology, from Oracle
Development." Meanwhile, Oracle's PL/SQL product manager will lead a
session on "PL/SQL Enhancements in the Next Major Release of Oracle
Database."
Amichai
Shulman, chief technology officer at security software vendor Imperva Inc.,
said he expects Oracle to add access-control and security auditing features to
its next database release. He added that the company needs to clean up
"rotten code" that was left over in 10g from older versions and is
behind many of the Oracle database security holes discovered this year.
At OpenWorld,
Oracle is also expected to detail an upcoming Version 1.1 release of SQL
Developer, a free database development tool with a graphical user interface
that the company released in March.
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