Unveiling Oracle11g Database

New York, 7/11/07. I attended the fabulous launching of the Oracle11g Database. I was positively impressed by the participation of all event stakeholders and speakers, including historian James Burke who conducted the introduction and closing of the event. Likewise, the presentation by Oracle President, Charles Phillips, laid out the innovation pathway provided by this new database release and emphasized important achievements in Oracle's #1 leadership in all database market positioning categories, including price/performance and TCP-C and TCP-H benchmarks. Other important participants were Chuck Rozwatt, Director of Server Technology, Andy Mendelsohn, who handled most of the technical input in important new features such as the new custom composite partitioning features involving range-range, list-list, list-hash, among others, which are optimized through a partitioning advisor; the new data guard high availability capabilities involving standby reporting and backup capabilities to further take load from the production server. Other important Oracle11g features involve enhancements made to XML datatypes with the new XML BLOB (compiled schema) capability.
Similarly, enhanced power is presented with other unstructured data involving graphics, email, documents, and others.

Surprisingly, another important enhancements involved the Real Application Testing feature, which allows to capture the workflow from production while allowing the actual test in a non-production testing environment, which allows for up to about 95% reduction in testing time and actual duration, by simply recapturing the workflow changes into the testing stage as needed.

Other important participants were IOUG President, Ari Kaplan, and various others partners and customers who participated in the Oracle11g beta testing with actual implementations. Probably, the most important technical aspect emphasizing Oracle11g was the growing of the grid, by announcing newly customized drill-down monitoring, performance tuning, and manageability features at various levels.

Perhaps, however, the most impressively innovative feature is the ability to customize query-rewrite-driven materialized views into an aggregate cube, with various perspectives. Probably, this feature will require special creative talent to use it at its best, but it is available to everyone who wishes to enhance business intelligence with materialized views for mission critical data warehousing purposes.

Andy Mendelsohn also demonstrated the impact of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) with the improved compression capabilities, which can reduce the overall storage cost via a cost-based multi-layer approach based also on the frequency of data usage. The combination of partitioning strategies with a consistent ILM approach, will lead not only to cost minimization and resource optimization but also to optimal performance.

Audit Vault was announced as a feature that can be downloaded independently and used with earlier releases as well, without having to wait for a major upgrade. There were other important features highlighted such as flash back data archive, streams enhancements, and overall performance factor improvements by category.

Indeed, it is important to highlight James Burke’s historical focus on Oracle growth and his career and life perspective on connections.

As advertised by Oracle Corporation, Oracle Database Technology is at least decades ahead of its most near competitors combined.