Oracle readies major app server upgrade
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InfoWorld - SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle on Wednesday will introduce Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2, which is being characterized as a significant upgrade to the product with improvements in Java, Web services, and identity management and the addition of RFID backing.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle is working on a tool to provide a complete life cycle for building, managing, and updating database applications, a company executive revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference here on Wednesday morning.
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IBM on September 17 will ship the first major upgrade to its DB2 Universal Database data management platform in nearly two years, focusing on functional automation, advanced clustering and Web services deployment.
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Oracle on Wednesday will introduce Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2, which is being characterized as a significant upgrade to the product with improvements in Java, Web services, and identity management and the addition of RFID backing.
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The server release, expected to be released to manufacturing before the end of the year, is now slated to be finalized
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Alison Holloway has announced that there's a new version of the Zend Core for Oracle out on the streets and can be downloaded here.    Zend have just released a new version of Zend Core for Oracle, the prebuilt stack of Oracle Instant Client, Apache and PHP. It's version 1.5 and now has an optional installation of Apache 2.0.59. It used to automatically install Apache 2 whether you wanted it or not, but now you can use an existing web server, either Apache, IIS, or Oracle's HTTP Server.    It's now using PHP 5.1.6, the latest OCI8 extension (Oracle's PHP driver), and Oracle Instant Client. This stack has a native installer, and it's available on Linux, AIX, Solaris and Windows.    You can get complete details on the package from this page on the Zend webstite including highlights and the system requirements to get it up and running.
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DECEMBER 07, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle Corp. tomorrow is set to introduce Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2, which is being characterized as a significant upgrade offering improvements
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle Corp.'s launch of new releases of its five application families was a surprisingly sober affair, designed to restate the vendor's May 2006 pledge to continue to enhance all of the software products. The event took place Wednesday in the glamorous red and gold Hudson Theatre in the heart of New York's theater district, but there was no burlesque-style entertainment or amusing video skits. Instead, there was a series of straight-up presentations and product demonstrations from Oracle executives outlining the functionalities of the new versions. Oracle displayed E-Business Suite (EBS) 12.0, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0, Siebel CRM 8.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12 and JD Edwards World A9.1. EBS is Oracle's long-time applications suite, while the vendor picked up all the other ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software through the acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel. At the time of those acquisitions, many users expressed concerns that Oracle would either force them to migrate to EBS or to Fusion, its planned new applications suite due to appear in 2008. In May 2006, Oracle committed publicly to continue to support and improve all the acquired applications under an initiative called "Applications Unlimited." Wednesday's event was the proof of that commitment, according to Oracle executives. "We thought we did a lot of work pitching Apps Unlimited at OpenWorld, but we found afterwards users still had a lot of questions," said John Wookey, senior vice president of applications at Oracle, in an interview at the event. Oracle's OpenWorld user conference was in October in San Francisco. Although JD Edwards World A9.1 shipped last April, the other products have only recently become available, for instance,Â EBS 12.0 debutedÂ last week. Capabilities across the board included role-based analytics, business intelligence dashboards, master data management and XML-based reporting. Specific improvements included a new task-based user interface and enterprise search functionality in Siebel 8.0 and new human capital management features such as talent management in PeopleSoft 9.0 Wookey also noted that plans are under way for the next releases of all the products. "Apps Unlimited is not a one-time thing, it will go forward," he said. For instance, Siebel 8.1, which will include a focus on self-service capabilities, should be out late this year. All the applications are integrated with Oracle's Fusion middleware, created using an SOA (service-oriented architecture) development approach. The idea is that by moving to the new versions of the Oracle applications, users will be well positioned to adopt the SOA-based Fusion applications come 2008. The Fusion applications will be based on Oracle's Fusion middleware. The only moments of unintentional levity came in the question-and-answer session where there was persistent feedback and echoes as customers and partners in Amsterdam, London, Mexico City and Paris posed questions to the Oracle executives in New York. Much of the tenor of the questions suggested some users are still confused about their choices. Oracle Applications Users Group recommends that users move to the new releases sooner rather than later, according to Basheer Khan, a major participant in the organization. "The sooner you're able to adopt and train up your IT, the better," he said. Khan described Wednesday's product launch as a "feather in Oracle's cap," and a move that's made users of the applications feel a lot more comfortable. "One thing we were concerned about was pricing," he said. "But now Oracle has said there are no upgrade fees; it's just like another upgrade." Customers are also pleased with Oracle's decision in late December to simplify its pricing model making life easier particularly for users running a number of different Oracle applications. Khan was also pleased to hear Wookey confirm that the Fusion applications when they appear will be integrated with several earlier versions of each application family. Â
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Oracle has starting shipping a suite of tools for linking Web 2.0 apps with data sources and business processes.
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Oracle database users discuss plans to upgrade to the new 11g database, saying its new features outweigh its shortcomings.
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Releases an open-source operating system update for corporate servers that offers three prominent virtualization technologies.
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Still no stack Seven months after purchasing Sleepycat Software, Oracle has updated the newest member of its embedded database family.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - With Web 2.0, SaaS (software as a service), and open source grabbing all of the headlines, launches of enterprise infrastructure software that were once major IT events now sometimes seem like forgotten affairs. Certainly the new millennium marked a downturn in interest for traditional, monolithic back-end software. Yet, boosted by virtualization, there appears to be plenty of life in old-school offerings. According to its 2007 global IT market forecast, IDC predicts that spending on infrastructure software will grow 9 percent this year, faster than any other software category. In this 'diminished' environment, Oracle's pending release of its upgraded 11g database may not grab the imagination of the technorati, but it remains significant to a vastly underestimated group of IT users. The global database market grew 14.2 percent last year to total $15.2 billion, according to Gartner. Oracle, which released its last major database upgrade, 10g, four years ago, already holds almost half the market. That's more than double the share of second-place IBM. The official launch of 11g is set for next Wednesday, July 11, in a New York City ceremony overseen by Oracle President Charles Philips. Publicly, Oracle has for the most part avoided specifics, saying that 11g will offer improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, and manageability. Tidbits it has revealed include free migration and management tools that will let administrators oversee non-Oracle databases at the same time they manage their Oracle ones. Oracle has also said that 11g will have new compression technology that could potentially reduce customers' storage demands by two-thirds, the ability to store unstructured data faster than traditional file systems, and better partitioning. Fleshing out the details Web accounts by beta testers and others are now confirming those reports. According to what appears to be a presentation by Oracle Vice President of Technology Mark Townsend, many of the new features are in the area of "change assurance." These help companies save money and testing time when migrating to new hardware or making configuration changes. For instance, features like database replay and SQL replay let DBAs view how changes in the database or SQL code affect performance. 11g will also let users set up test environments using snapshot standbys and help automate rolling database upgrades. Other features include online table and index redefinition, support for online hot patching and continuous availability of online applications even when they are in the midst of an upgrade, and automatic diagnostic workflow to fix problems faster. In the area of information lifecycle management, 11g will allow DBAs for the first time to partition by interval, ref, or virtual column. It also adds a new composite way to partition. According to an article by Jim Czuprynski, an Oracle senior instructor at Fujitsu Consulting who beta-tested 11g, some of the best new features include in-memory caches for retaining widely used, slow-changing data; better diagnosis and repair features; and enhancements to Oracle's flashback tools for data recovery. Longtime Oracle watcher Donald Burleson notes in his list of 11g features support for schema-based Document Type Definitions for describing the internal structure of XML documents as well as more scalable Java for faster performance. On security, an area for which Oracle has been criticized of late, Burleson says 11g will include improvements such as case-sensitive passwords and an inviolable audit vault that protects against insider threats. Iggy Fernandez, editor of the NoCOUG Journal, the official newsletter for the Northern California Oracle Users Group, praises what he says is 11g's unheralded "learning optimizer" feature. "When relational databases replaced hierarchical and network databases in the 1980s, the promise was that programmers would no longer need to optimize their queries by hand," said Fernandez. While no database has "completely realized" that vision, 11g, says Fernandez, is a "great step -- the query optimizer simply learns from its mistakes -- in fact, it can stop a query that is already in progress and try a different approach!" "Performance tuning is the biggest component of database administration effort today, and the learning optimizer could produce tremendous labor savings if it works as advertised," Fernandez said. But will users upgrade? With 11g, will Oracle be able to extend its lead over IBM -- whose release of DB2 9 "Viper" last summer did not lead to mass early uptake, according to the Gartner figures -- by convincing users to rush and upgrade? Kevin Closson, chief software architect for clustering vendor Polyserve, says yes, based on how stable this release already is known to be. "From everything I've seen in this release, there should be no technical reasons holding back customers' adoption," Closson wrote in his blog. But Amy Stuemky, database administrator for travel tour operator Globus, says her organization is just starting to move its 50 Oracle databases to 10g. "Our philosophy with Oracle is that it is too bleeding-edge with any first release," Stuemky said. And the company is only moving now because Oracle's regular support, called Premier Support, is about to end. "Oracle almost pushes you [to upgrade] by desupporting its stuff," she said. Fernandez agrees that expecting users to rush to 11g any faster than they did with prior versions would be unrealistic. "There is just too much effort involved in testing and upgrading critical business systems and new releases can be plagued with software bugs," he wrote. "Speaking for myself, I would prefer Oracle to fix the bugs that still remain in the previous version instead of give us a feature-packed new version!" Oracle will go slow with one aspect of 11g. For its free Express Edition aimed at students and developers, which Oracle debuted in 2005, the company won't release an upgrade until the more stable 11g R2 comes out, according to an Austrian developer, Slavojub Krishan, who cited conversations with Oracle executives at a recent developer conference.
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Oracle announced the first major upgrade of its business applications in six years, and company officials vowed that migrating won't be as difficult as it was the last time around.
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Members of the Oracle Applications User Group at this week's Connection Point 2004 said Oracle has made strides by rolling out new support tools and processes, but has more work to do to make their jobs easier.
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Oracle is expected to unveil updates to its software's content management and business intelligence functions, as well as other enhancements at next week's Oracle OpenWorld user event.
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Oracle Corp. today patched 45 vulnerabilities in its flagship database as well as its application server, collaboration suite, e-business line and PeopleSoft software.