Oracle's upgraded database now available

INDIA, NEW DELHI: Oracle, on Friday announced that Oracle Database 11g Release 2 is available and downloadable from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).

This latest generation of database builds on the innovations introduced in Oracle Database 11g to help organizations deliver better information throughout the enterprise, said a press release.

“Our customers want features that offer better performance and availability, lower IT costs and ways to deliver better information to their business users,” said Sundar Ram, vice president, Technology Sales Consulting.

“The availability of Release 2 completes the vision of Oracle Database 11g to address today’s business and IT challenges, and continues our strategy of helping customers deliver the highest quality of service at lower cost,” he added.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2, in combination with the Oracle Database Machine, can deliver faster query performance.

It delivers enhanced query performance with the ability to transparently execute a query against data stored in memory across all the servers in a grid.

In this release, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) delivers grid plug and play and new server pooling capabilities that enable organizations to reduce their server costs by streamlining the provisioning and management of consolidated database grids, said the release.

The combination of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Advanced Compression and Partitioning supports the reduction of storage costs by compressing data as much as 2-4x and simplifying use of lower cost storage tiers.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Real Application Clusters, and Active Data Guard allow storage and server resources to be used for both fault tolerance and running production workloads, keeping servers and storage from sitting idle waiting for failures.

Carl Olofson, Research vice president, IDC said , “As organizations face exponential information growth and complexity throughout the data center, they are seeking to minimize IT costs and increase administrative efficiencies.”

Olofson further added that Oracle Database 11g Release 2 features enhancements to grid computing, storage management and administration capabilities that are designed to help users achieve greater resource utilization of their information management systems while making the related system infrastructure and storage easier to manage and more affordable.

Edition-based Redefinition is introduced to allow customer database applications to be upgraded online; this removes the need for separate upgrade environments.

Automated self-management capabilities can help to double database administrator productivity over older versions of Oracle Database, and reduce the time required to upgrade from prior releases, added the press release.