Oracle 11g: First on Linux
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While Wednesday marked the official unveiling of Oracle Corp.&#39;s 11g database and a look at its new features, pricing and availability information was pretty thin on the ground. All the vendor would confirm is that the Linux version of 11g will ship this quarter, probably in August.
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When Perl isn't fast enough, you can have applications interact with Oracle databases by using C.
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(InfoWorld) - While Wednesday markedÂ the official unveiling of Oracle's 11g databaseÂ and a look at its new features, pricing and availability information was pretty thin on the ground. All the vendor would confirm is that the Linux version of 11g will ship this quarter, probably in August. "It's our intention to do a pricing announcement closer to the release date," said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president ofÂ server technologies at Oracle. "It's just a matter of weeks before we make that announcement." He was speaking during a question-and-answer session following a more than two-hour 11g launch event in New York. Oracle wouldn't comment on when 11g would be available for the other operating systems the database will support, including Microsoft's Windows. What also remained unclear was which of the 400 features on display would end up being part of 11g and,Â thus, free to customers upgrading from previous versions of the database and which functionality will Oracle charge users for as additional options for 11g. Rozwat said he couldn't make that call on Wednesday, but that the information would also be forthcoming next month. Earlier during the launch event, Oracle president Charles Phillips tried to set the 11g release in context. Oracle's currently celebrating its 30th year in business since beginning life as Software Development Laboratories, later Relational Software, a startup working on building a relational database. Since that time, Oracle has expanded, often through acquisition, into providing a wide range of other software, notably middleware and back-office applications. Databases remain an important source of revenue for the vendor andÂ provide a 275,000-strong customer base into which it can try to sell its other products. The name "Oracle" originally came from the code name for a project the startup was working on for the CIA, said Phillips, a comparatively recent addition to the company, who joined Oracle in 2003. He recalled an anecdote he'd been told by Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder and CEO. The startup had expanded to two offices but had no way to run cabling for its servers between the two rooms. It appeared an intractable problem, but Ellison picked up a hammer and banged a hole in the wall, resolving the issue. "That's why we're Oracle today, and he still carries that hammer around," Phillips quipped. Customers' data needs are highly diverse, and Oracle's trying to cater to all of those different requirements, Phillips said. He drew a comparison with modes of transport. Some users are riding tricycles while others are flying first class on a Boeing 747 jet, he said, so running the gamut from a basic need to store and access data up to highly sophisticated requirements around database security, management, storage, and compliance issues. All customers are struggling with an explosion in the amount of data their IT systems have to handle and an increase in the number of people wanting to access that data more frequently, Phillips said. For some time customers have been requesting the ability to apply patches to Oracle's database while it is still up and running, and that's now available in 11g, Phillips said. "They don't want to stop what they're doing and take the database down," he added. It took Oracle several years to develop that functionality, Phillips noted. IT users are also being pressured to do more with less resources, so 11g includes advanced compression and partitioning capabilities so that customers can choose where they store their data and can opt to put less accessed, older information on cheaper storage devices, he added.
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Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ) will report fiscal first-quarter results. Analysts polled by Thomson First Call expect quarterly earnings of 9 cents per share on revenue of $2.
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Ziff Davis - Sybase is offering a free version of its leading enterprise database management system for Linux.
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Looking to avoid the costly fragmentation that stifled the Unix market, members of the Free Standards Group have announced a new version of a critical Linux standard that many of its proponents hope will cement the future for the open-source operating
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SAN FRANCISCO - Oracle and VMwareÂ  are developing an easier way to install and configure Oracle's software, executives from the two companies said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference Thursday.ADVERTISEMENTSolaris 10(TM) OS: Position your business ten moves ahead.Solaris 10 OS has arrived and provides even more reasons for the world's most demanding businesses to operate on this, the leading UNIX platform. Like the fact you can run Linux and Solaris applications side-by-side and run the same OS on SPARC(R), AMD Opteron(TM), and Intel processor-based systems. Discover more reasons and how Solaris 10 OS can move your business ahead today.
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Oracle rang in the first day of its OpenWorld European conference series on Monday by touting the growth of grid computing in Europe, followed with the main news of the day: the release of E-Business Suite Version 11i.
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(InfoWorld) - With Web 2.0, SaaS (software as a service), and open source grabbing all of the headlines, launches of enterprise infrastructure software that were once major IT events now sometimes seem like forgotten affairs. Certainly the new millennium marked a downturn in interest for traditional, monolithic back-end software. Yet, boosted by virtualization, there appears to be plenty of life in old-school offerings. According to its 2007 global IT market forecast, IDC predicts that spending on infrastructure software will grow 9 percent this year, faster than any other software category. In this 'diminished' environment, Oracle's pending release of its upgraded 11g database may not grab the imagination of the technorati, but it remains significant to a vastly underestimated group of IT users. The global database market grew 14.2 percent last year to total $15.2 billion, according to Gartner. Oracle, which released its last major database upgrade, 10g, four years ago, already holds almost half the market. That's more than double the share of second-place IBM. The official launch of 11g is set for next Wednesday, July 11, in a New York City ceremony overseen by Oracle President Charles Philips. Publicly, Oracle has for the most part avoided specifics, saying that 11g will offer improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, and manageability. Tidbits it has revealed include free migration and management tools that will let administrators oversee non-Oracle databases at the same time they manage their Oracle ones. Oracle has also said that 11g will have new compression technology that could potentially reduce customers' storage demands by two-thirds, the ability to store unstructured data faster than traditional file systems, and better partitioning. Fleshing out the details Web accounts by beta testers and others are now confirming those reports. According to what appears to be a presentation by Oracle Vice President of Technology Mark Townsend, many of the new features are in the area of "change assurance." These help companies save money and testing time when migrating to new hardware or making configuration changes. For instance, features like database replay and SQL replay let DBAs view how changes in the database or SQL code affect performance. 11g will also let users set up test environments using snapshot standbys and help automate rolling database upgrades. Other features include online table and index redefinition, support for online hot patching and continuous availability of online applications even when they are in the midst of an upgrade, and automatic diagnostic workflow to fix problems faster. In the area of information lifecycle management, 11g will allow DBAs for the first time to partition by interval, ref, or virtual column. It also adds a new composite way to partition. According to an article by Jim Czuprynski, an Oracle senior instructor at Fujitsu Consulting who beta-tested 11g, some of the best new features include in-memory caches for retaining widely used, slow-changing data; better diagnosis and repair features; and enhancements to Oracle's flashback tools for data recovery. Longtime Oracle watcher Donald Burleson notes in his list of 11g features support for schema-based Document Type Definitions for describing the internal structure of XML documents as well as more scalable Java for faster performance. On security, an area for which Oracle has been criticized of late, Burleson says 11g will include improvements such as case-sensitive passwords and an inviolable audit vault that protects against insider threats. Iggy Fernandez, editor of the NoCOUG Journal, the official newsletter for the Northern California Oracle Users Group, praises what he says is 11g's unheralded "learning optimizer" feature. "When relational databases replaced hierarchical and network databases in the 1980s, the promise was that programmers would no longer need to optimize their queries by hand," said Fernandez. While no database has "completely realized" that vision, 11g, says Fernandez, is a "great step -- the query optimizer simply learns from its mistakes -- in fact, it can stop a query that is already in progress and try a different approach!" "Performance tuning is the biggest component of database administration effort today, and the learning optimizer could produce tremendous labor savings if it works as advertised," Fernandez said. But will users upgrade? With 11g, will Oracle be able to extend its lead over IBM -- whose release of DB2 9 "Viper" last summer did not lead to mass early uptake, according to the Gartner figures -- by convincing users to rush and upgrade? Kevin Closson, chief software architect for clustering vendor Polyserve, says yes, based on how stable this release already is known to be. "From everything I've seen in this release, there should be no technical reasons holding back customers' adoption," Closson wrote in his blog. But Amy Stuemky, database administrator for travel tour operator Globus, says her organization is just starting to move its 50 Oracle databases to 10g. "Our philosophy with Oracle is that it is too bleeding-edge with any first release," Stuemky said. And the company is only moving now because Oracle's regular support, called Premier Support, is about to end. "Oracle almost pushes you [to upgrade] by desupporting its stuff," she said. Fernandez agrees that expecting users to rush to 11g any faster than they did with prior versions would be unrealistic. "There is just too much effort involved in testing and upgrading critical business systems and new releases can be plagued with software bugs," he wrote. "Speaking for myself, I would prefer Oracle to fix the bugs that still remain in the previous version instead of give us a feature-packed new version!" Oracle will go slow with one aspect of 11g. For its free Express Edition aimed at students and developers, which Oracle debuted in 2005, the company won't release an upgrade until the more stable 11g R2 comes out, according to an Austrian developer, Slavojub Krishan, who cited conversations with Oracle executives at a recent developer conference.
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IntelÂ has released its Quick Start Kit for Linux, stepping up support for Asian system integrators that offer Linux-based desktop PCs.
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Intel has released a Quick Start Kit for Linux in Asia, giving a leg-up to system builders offering Linux-based desktop PCs. The kit is similar to those that Intel produces for Windows, said an Intel spokesman.
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The International Open Source Network (IOSN), an organization funded by the United Nations, has released a beginner&#39;s manual for the Linux desktop.
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In the first major release of its flagship product in several years, Oracle unveiled 11g on Wednesday. The Redwood Shores, California-based company said that the new database software contains more than 400 features for improving database clustering, data center automation, and workload management.
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Gets your retaliation in first In a pre-emptive strike against Oracle, database vendor MySQL has launched its first site-wide license and support package, pricing it the same as a single Oracle CPU database license.â¦
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What is happening with carrier grade Linux and kernel contributions in this area?
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Rob Richards has posted his own review of the Packt Publishing book "PHP Oracle Web Development" to his blog today.   Overrall I would have to say that PHP Oracle Web Development is a good book for a PHP developer needing to get up to speed quickly working with an Oracle database. [...] The only place I found the book lacking was the initial setup of the environment.   The environment they chose to go with was a Windows setup which caused him problem when he tried to compile with the oci8 extensions - libraries weren't found where they were needed. His solution? Setting his ORACLE_HOME to the right location then all was well.
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Oracle Corp.  promised to take the Linux software world by storm last October, but the major expansion by one of the world's largest software companies so far has failed to show momentum.