- ZDNet Tags:
- Storage,
- Database management,
- Business applications,
- Oracle
- Microsoft
- Ibm
New releases of Oracle's core database software come around about as
often as presidential elections. So it's no surprise that the company
is spending a good chunk of Wednesday explaining to the world why its
new 11g software was worth the wait.
Oracle 11g is
focused on supporting fast-moving businesses and the hundreds of
terabytes of data they accumulate, said Bob Shimp, Oracle's vice
president of product marketing. It supports faster application
deployments and is more efficient at using storage than previous
releases, he said.
The database business itself isn't
known for rapid change. Oracle, despite years of work--and many large
acquisitions--intended to build its software applications business,
still draws nearly 70 percent of its revenue from database software, as
it did more than a decade ago.
What has changed is how companies use that software. New drivers for
database sales include more widespread use of imaging--maps, medical
images, photos and videos--that companies continue to accumulate, along
with storage and management of RFID data, said Shimp.
Taken collectively, "content management" is one of the main catalysts
for expanding database sales, said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice
president of server technologies at Oracle. In 11g, such unstructured
data can be stored and retrieved more quickly than in previous
releases, and it can be encrypted, said Mendelsohn.
Still, there's been lots of hand-wringing this week over whether
Oracle's customers are willing to make the move to 11g. The main Oracle
user group said that of the customers it has surveyed, 35 percent plan
to upgrade within a year of 11g's release, and 53 percent plan to wait
"a few years" until they upgrade.
While those figures may sound low, at least when viewed in comparison
to consumer-focused software, they're actually very high for
big-ticket, complex business software, Mendelsohn says. "Thirty-five
percent in a year is actually about double the rate we've seen with
past releases," he said.
Upgrading database software is a notoriously slow and painful process,
said James Governor, an industry analyst with RedMonk. "There is often
a lag (between database release and adoption), and it depends on the
customer set."
"It's hard for us to predict the upgrade cycle. We're optimistic,"
Oracle's president Charles Phillips said during a press conference on
Wednesday in New York.
Regardless, given Oracle's share of the database software
market--nearly 50 percent according to Gartner--even a relatively low
percentage of upgrades represents big money. Oracle remains the largest
database seller, despite strong competition from Microsoft and IBM.
Open-source alternatives, like MySQL continue to gain ground as well.
"One reason it's great to see the release of 11g is that all the buzz
has been around the new applications-based business model. But the real
heart of the Oracle franchise remains its relational database products.
The database business is paying for a lot of change," said Governor.
Under the covers
Oracle said 11g introduces a number of big changes. One, called Real
Application Testing can shorten the time needed to test new software
applications against the 11g database, and make it easier to get those
applications up and running. "It's a matter of days...versus months and
months today," said Mendelsohn.
While 11g doesn't include a quantum leap in features over previous
releases, it does pack some key advances over 10g, he said. One feature
is compression of all data so that it takes less storage space. Oracle
10g included compression, but not for all data types, Mendelsohn said.
Compression could be an important feature for companies managing large
amounts of imaging data, for instance.
Another feature, called Data Guard, lets companies more easily switch
over to standby copies of data in the event of an system failure.
Oracle didn't immediately announce pricing for 11g. A company
representative said that information would be available within a few
weeks.
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