Oracle 11g for all
Connecting state and local government leaders
GCN Insider | Latest version of Oracle's flagship database management system has a little something for everyone.
Next month, Oracle will release the latest version of its flagship database management system, Oracle 11g, for Linux platforms. And a version for Microsoft Windows will be coming later in the year. The company says the new version is a significant upgrade from the Oracle 10g platform and has more than 400 new features, including hot-patching, enhanced compression capabilities and automatic data partitioning.
Which of those many features will be most interesting for government users? There's a little something for everyone, it seems.
One of the most interesting features for Ian Abramson, executive vice president at the Independent Oracle Users Group, is the information life cycle management tools. ILM looks at data in a database and moves the little-used records off to a less-expensive ' though slower-to-access ' storage medium. 'Especially...government people ' anyone using large warehouses ' they are looking at ways to move data into archives and lower-cost storage, and ILM automates that whole process,' he said.
Peter Doolan, vice president of technology at Oracle's public-sector division, said the company has seen that most enterprise databases triple in size every two years. ILM, along with some of the compression features, will help contain the storage costs.
The new database also has several new data types that would be of particular interest to government agencies, including those for radio frequency identification tags and geospatial coordinates. Each will have dedicated attributes and functions that people can use to more easily manipulate the data.
Other features could find favor in specific jobs. For example, a new feature called Real Application Testing helps administrators test new configurations by simulating actual traffic patterns sampled from the production version of the database. Oracle 11g also supports Semantic Web tools such as the Rich Description Format and Web Ontology Language, allowing those advanced Extensible Markup Language users to craft relationships among the data elements, Doolan said.
'Everybody has a little bit of a different perspective about what they love and hate about these databases,' Abramson said. And Oracle 11g, it seems, sets out to address as many areas as it can.
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