Offering Companies a Variety of Database Selections with Oracle

As one of the largest enterprise software vendors in the world, Oracle’s vast product portfolio currently includes customer relationship management products, Web application software tools, business intelligence technologies, middleware products and enterprise resource planning tools. It also carries a large stack of database products.

Sitting on top of that stack currently is the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 technology. The 11g product was first released in 2007 and has been enhanced several times since then. The product runs on UNIX, Linux and Windows operating systems and is optimized for availability, performance and scalable application environments. The product supports an innovative data compression technology that is designed to reduce storage requirements and improve data retrieval speeds. The 11g database is also capable of storing and handling unstructured data, such as weblogs and click stream data, more efficiently than previous generation relational database management system (RDBMS) products. The technology is optimized for big data environments and supports functions for online analytic processing, real-time data mining and in-memory data processing. The 11g product is available in a high-end enterprise configuration and a slightly less scalable standard edition. Earlier this year, the company released the 11g Express Edition, which is an entry-level RDBMS that the company is making available for free.

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is another option that is available with the 11g Enterprise Edition. RAC technology is designed to let enterprises take a single database instance and run it on multiple servers for increased scalability and fault tolerance. Oracle is targeting RAC at enterprises that are looking for 24-7, continuous availability for their online transactions processing (OLTP) applications. The product starts with an entry-level RAC One Node configuration and can be scaled up on demand simply by adding more servers to the cluster. The company claims that the technology will help enterprises reduce the total cost of ownership of their transaction processing environments while also offering them better scalability and performance. Importantly, the ability to run a database across multiple servers also offers companies more availability compared to situations in which the database is implemented on a single server. Many companies that have deployed the technology are using it to consolidate their online transaction processing and data warehousing applications.

Although Oracle’s 11g edition is the latest version, a large number of enterprises continue to use the company’s previous generation 10g database technology. The product was released in 2004 and was the first Oracle technology to support grid computing. The product features a Web-based graphical user interface function called the Enterprise Manager Grid Control that allows database administrators to manage their storage, transaction processing and application servers as part of a unified grid. The technology also features a portal capability that let enterprises enable unified access to heterogeneous data stores. The portal lets users access and share content enterprise-wide regardless of the operating system and application environment where data is stored. The 10g product places a heavy emphasis on the automation of Oracle database administration functions. For instance, 10g automates key functions such as workload management, disk-based backup and recovery, storage management and an automated diagnostics monitor.


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