A Closer Look at Oracle's 11g Database ReleaseA Closer Look at Oracle's 11g Database Release

"It's a big deal for Oracle and for the IT industry." That's how Oracle President, Charles Phillips, described last week's launch of Oracle 11g, the firm's first major database release in four years. It was no overstatement, as Oracle's market-leading database serves at the heart of tens of thousands of data warehouses and the locus of information management for more than two hundred thousand customers.

Underscoring his firm's database dominance, Phillips cited Gartner figures that put Oracle's market share at 47.1 percent, "more than IBM and Microsoft combined," he asserted. But Phillip's higher calling was to dispel the idea that database management systems have been commoditized in a mature market, so he and fellow Oracle executives focused on a bevy of new features and functions, highlighting benefits including improved performance, accelerated change management, increased scalability, easier administration and reduced cost.

The short list of upgrades includes:

An enhanced data mirroring feature designed to boost performance and enable "rolling" upgrades without taking the database down,

A Real Application Testing feature said to dramatically shorten test and deployment cycles,

A Total Recall capability designed to meet compliance and audit demands,

Partitioning and materialized view enhancements aimed at data warehouse deployments,

A Fast Files capability said to efficiently manage documents, images, e-mail and other unstructured data within the database.

For DBAs and CIOs

Oracle's Data Guard data mirroring feature, which exists in the current 10g database, maintains a hot standby server that takes over if the production server fails. It's an important reliability and availability feature available in most databases, yet some customers find it hard to justify the cost of licensing a separate server that's typically idle. Data Guard upgrades in 11g change these economics by letting you shift production reporting and I/O-intensive backup activities to the standby server.

"Now Data Guard is not just a protection against disaster, it's an assurance of performance because it offloads resource-intensive workloads from the production system," explained Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of the Oracle Database Group.

The Data Guard upgrade also supports online upgrades and patches without taking a database out of service, and that includes the upgrade to the latest release. "You can upgrade to 11g on the standby database while you're still running production on 10g R2," said Mendelsohn. "Once you're sure the upgrade has gone well, you can switch users over to 11g on the standby server and then upgrade the production server without experiencing downtime."

The Real Application Testing feature introduced in 11g lets you capture and replay a live copy of your production database for testing purposes, yet it doesn’t create new overhead on the database. By Oracle's estimates, this Tivo-like feature could reduce the time required to test new applications, changed applications or database upgrades by as much as 80 percent because it eliminates the need to recreate a production workload in a test suite.

The new Data Guard and Real Application Testing capabilities are unique to Oracle, according to Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg, but the breakthrough he describes as most significant is Total Recall, which "can eliminate the hassle of archiving." The feature is designed to let you go back in time and perform queries as of a certain date.

"Instead of saving the actual data, Total Recall keeps the logs of changes to the data back as far as you want to go," Feinberg said. "If your auditors come in and want to see data from January 1, 2007, you can do a query and specify that date in the SQL statement. It's also selectable by table, so you don't have to query the entire database."

Another feature that's unique in the database market is Oracle's Data Vault, which was previously a separate product but is now being rolled into 11g (though its not clear whether it will be an option or a standard feature). The Data Vault separates administrative control of the database from access to the data, an advance aimed at compliance and security concerns.

"Architects and administrators have all-access privileges, so they can copy and modify information and, if they're smart, they can cover their own tracks," said Ari Kaplan, president of the International Oracle User Group. "For the first time in any database, the Vaulting capability separates administrative control over the information, so I think a lot of companies will make it mandatory to upgrade to 11g."

For the Data Warehousing Gurus

Upgrades aimed at the BI and data warehousing communities include advanced partitioning and accelerated query processing. Oracle Partitioning — an existing, optional scalability and manageability feature for high-volume environments — has been enhanced with rules-based automated partitioning, and it extends existing range, hash and list partitioning to include interval, reference and virtual column partitioning. Also added are composite partitioning options supporting rules-driven storage management.

To speed query performance and support large-scale, high-volume deployments, Oracle has embedded an OLAP engine in 11g to store and efficiently manage up to millions of materialized views. Used by some 60 percent of Oracle's data warehousing customers, materialized views are a sort of pre-fetching technique used to speed multidimensional queries.

"The big breakthrough here is that we're able to use the OLAP cubes as a transparent performance accelerator inside the [relational] database," said Mendelsohn. "The users are still happily using their SQL applications, and they won't even know they're using OLAP." The cubes are refreshed as the data changes in underlying SQL tables.

Playing Catch Up

Not all the new features in 11g are breakthroughs. For example, the added support for binary XML follows in the footsteps of IBM, Microsoft and Sybase, and the new data compression features are also matched by competitors. Oracle itself has long supported storage of large unstructured data objects such as images and documents, but the Fast Files feature introduced in 11g is said to match or beat file system retrieval speeds. That may hasten changes in content management architectures.

"Many large enterprises would not make expensive file servers and proprietary repositories (long the backbone of document management and enterprise content management systems) their first choice for managing ECM-related files, noted analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch. "Surely IBM and Microsoft will respond with their own capabilities."

The one thing Oracle failed to do last week was provide a lot of detail on release dates, pricing and standard-versus-optional features — other than to say that the first release would be a Linux version set for August. During a news conference, Phillips said pricing would follow the same model used on 10g, but he acknowledged some new features might be optional. If the company follows past practice, the Unix and Windows versions of the database will bow within 90 days of the Linux release.

Competitors Sybase, IBM and Microsoft will bring enhancements of their own to the market over the next six months. Sybase is expected to announce new capabilities at its August TechWave user conference in Las Vegas. IBM released a beta version of its DB2 Viper database earlier this month with enhancements including automated fail over, greater flexibility and granularity in security, auditing and access control (an answer to Data Vault?) and simplified memory management. Microsoft will announce SQL Server 2008 as early as February with release set for the second quarter. Enhancements will include better support for spatial data, something also introduced in 11g.

So it seems the database market is more like a competitive hot bed than a "mature and commoditized" realm, and with growth rates averaging 14.2 percent, it's actually outpacing the "hot" BI market.