By Siobhan Kennedy in Los Angeles
Oracle used the first day of its OpenWorld conference in Los Angeles yesterday to announce the first update to its 8i internet database since the product’s launch in March. While release 2.0 features improvements to overall scalability and performance, Oracle was more keen to focus the attention away from the product’s core database functionality and concentrate on the platform’s application development capabilities as well as highlighting new built in data warehousing features that Oracle says significantly reduce the time it takes to carry out standard queries and reports.
Oracle says the key feature of release 2 is the platform’s support for the upcoming Java2 standard. We’re the only vendor to offer that right now, said Rene Bonvanie, senior director of product marketing, and it’s what’s attracting all the new developers to 8i. Since the launch of 8i, Bonvanie said, there have been around a quarter of a million downloads of the software from Oracle’s web site, and over half of those have been from new developers who have been attracted to Oracle because of 8i’s Java functionality coupled with the availability, and increasing popularity, of Linux.
Pretty much all our developers are using 8i to develop Java applications now, he said. Either internal web-based applications or internet based e-commerce type applications. He said that rivals, like IBM with its DB2 platform, were well behind on Java support. While Oracle supports Java natively, that’s not the case with IBM, he said, where users are forced to develop outside the database instead of using it as the development platform.
It’s language like that which highlights Oracle’s intention to position 8i as anything but a pure database. To that end, the new release also features new data warehouse functionality built inside the core system. In the past, Bonvanie said, if users wanted to select an area of data to query they had to write an application to extract that data, collect it, transform it, aggregate it, and then put it back into the database ready for querying by a third party tool such as Business Objects or Cognos.
But now, Oracle has added that functionality to the database itself so there’s no need to extract the data. You simply select the area you require and the process is automatically carried out by 8i. You still need the analytic tools, but users no longer have to spend hours manually extracting the information and playing with it before running the analytic applications.
Bonvanie says the technology is good for at least 80% of any company’s day-to-day queries. He admits that there will still be some departments and individuals that want to run specific business queries – that’s what Oracle’s Express Server is for, he says – but for the daily trend analysis and forecast analysis type queries, the new technology will suffice, Bonvanie says.
In terms of sheer database performance improvements, Bonvanie said the software ran substantially faster out of the door than the previous release, although Oracle doesn’t have any benchmarking evidence to back up its claims. He did, however, point to recent TPC benchmarking data which shows that 8i release 2 runs ten times faster on IBM’s RS/6000 platform that its own DB2 software. Oracle is also touting improvements to scalability, boasting increases to failover performance by a factor of ten. Effectively, this means that if an 8i server goes down, Oracle is now promising it will get itself back up and running ten times faster than it did in the past – a factor which it says is key for running an e-business.
In addition, the Oracle Enterprise Manager 2.1, management software which comes as part of 8i, now includes web-based control of 12 sub-systems within 8i including Parallel Server, Oracle interMedia and Oracle applications. Release 2 will be available in December and pricing will be based on the same license structure as for 8i, Bonvanie said. á
