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Beta testers ready to
upgrade to Oracle 11g
New version adds security, testing features;
still lacks grid support
July 11, 2007 (IDG News Service) -- Several Oracle Corp. database users this week said they
expect their companies to quickly upgrade to the new 11g version, which
includes new security, testing and management features.
Oracle 11g, unveiled Wednesday at an event in
"Oracle was a little bit more cautious, wanting to make sure
they got the product right," said Ari Kaplan, president of the Independent Oracle Users
Group (IOUG) and a senior consultant at Datalink
Corp., a database consulting firm in Chanhassen, Minn. User group members were
heavily involved in the 11g beta testing program, Kaplan said.
Kaplan said improved integration of 11g with Oracle's Audit Vault
and Database Vault software is an important upgrade in the new database. The
update will help prevent database administrators from making unwanted changes
to data, he noted.
"There's a key flaw with all databases," he said.
"If they're smart, a DBA can modify data and cover their tracks." The
technologies in Oracle's vaulting software make that impossible, since every
action a DBA executes effectively "goes into a lockbox that they are
powerless to modify," Kaplan added.
Wachovia Corp., based in
Mulheren said he expects that that the improved
security features in 11g will help Wachovia meet ever-increasing regulatory
demands on financial services companies. Mulheren
said that updates like 11g's support of case-sensitive passwords bring the
database's security capabilities more in line with Wachovia's Windows desktop
security policies. The feature also means that users have to remember fewer
passwords, he added.
Arup Nanda, senior director of database engineering and
architecture at Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc. in
"We will have to settle for the production release later this
year and then at least six months of testing after that," he wrote in an
e-mail. Starwood uses Oracle's database for almost all of its business
processes, including reservations, check-in and check-out, and guest loyalty
programs, he said.
Nanda listed the Database Replay and SQL Performance Analyzer
features as key new features in 11g. On the other hand, he added that the new
offering continues to lack key capabilities such as the ability to make a tablespace read only when there are active transactions in
the database on different tablespaces.
Mike Amble, senior vice president of operations and engineering at
Fidelity National Information Services Inc. in
"We tend to deal with a lot of odd forms of
information," he said. For instance, when a house is sold, all the
documents related to the sale including appraisals and title documents are sent
back to the mortgage company in paper form and then scanned and stored. Fast
Files will allow users to store large objects like images in the 11g database
as fast as storing such unstructured information in traditional file systems,
Amble said.
Amble added that the new Real Application Testing feature, which
promises to help users effectively record a segment of their database
operations and then use and replay that recording as a testing environment
instead of having to spend months creating a testbed,
should also be helpful to many users.
Amble noted that incorporating Oracle's Data Guard disaster recovery tool set into 11g will
allow users to offload workloads from their production database to a standby
system set up using the software. Fidelity already uses the disaster recovery
software, he noted.
Amble said he hopes that Fidelity can migrate to 11g in 2008.
"In the beta testing, we've not found a lot of issues, it should be a very
easy transition," he said. Amble added that he hopes Oracle will add the
ability to manage of multiple encryption tools, from both Oracle and
third-party vendors, in future versions of the database.
Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president
of database server technologies at Oracle, estimated that more than 1,500
Oracle developers and technicians have worked on 11g. The company engaged in a
"huge amount of testing," he said, running the beta software on
Oracle's server farm of more than 2,000 processors.
The company already has a parallel development project under way
to work on 11g Release 2. Mendelsohn did concede that
11g lacks extensive support for grid computing, even though the "g"
in both 10g and 11g refer to grid technology. "We're doing a lot of work
in grid technologies for the next release, which will make grid infrastructure
even easier to adopt," Mendelsohn said.
Mendelsohn also confirmed earlier reports that
Oracle doesn't plan to immediately ship 11g implementation for its free Express
Edition (XE) database. The new version will likely come with the release of 11g
Release 2, he said.
According to Gartner Inc.'s latest figures, released in June,
Oracle was the worldwide market leader in the relational database management
system market with a 47.1% share, trailed by IBM, in second place with 21.1% of the market, and Microsoft Corp., with 17.4%. In April,
Framingham, Mass.-based IDC's initial 2006 figures painted much the same
picture.
"We don't really worry about the competition," said
Charles Phillips, Oracle's president. "We have such a lead." Oracle's
challenge is how fast it can meet its customers' needs, he added. He dismissed
IBM, saying it derives 90% of its database revenue from mainframe, and
described Microsoft as being "regulated to Windows." Oracle offers
its database on a number of operating systems, including Linux.
Kaplan said a good chunk of IOUG members plan to upgrade to 11g
relatively quickly. In recent poll of members, 35% said they plan to upgrade to
11g within a year of its release, and an another 53% said they plan to adopt
the new database in the next few years, according to Kaplan.
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