Oracle apps upgrade to ship within 60 days
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SEPTEMBER 06, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Customers will be able to get their hands on the delayed version of Oracle Corp.&#39;s E-Business Suite 11i.
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SAN FRANCISCO  - Business software maker  Oracle Corp.  said on Thursday it extended again its $7.7 billion hostile tender offer for PeopleSoft Inc. , to Sept. 10, as it awaits a U.S. District Court judge's ruling on whether the takeover attempt can move forward.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Oracle Corp. , the third-largest software maker, gave BEA Systems Inc.'s directors five days to consider a $6.7 billion takeover offer before it expires. BEA said it can't accept Oracle's price.
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Updated OS, new consumer products expected to be introduced next month.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Oracle's lawsuit against rival SAP will move finally to trial on February 9, 2009 -- almost two years after the suit was initially filed, SAP said Tuesday. After a case management conference with the two sides that had been postponed from September 4, Judge Martin Jenkins of the Northern District Court in San Francisco set the date for the four-week trial, along with a deadline for motions of November 13, 2008. A further case management conference will be held February 12, 2009. Jenkins is expected to issue a more detailed order, with limits on discovery and the possible use of mediation toÂ resolve the dispute, SAP said. In March,Â Oracle sued SAPÂ for illegally downloading customer support materials from an Oracle Web site, via its TomorrowNow subsidiary. SAP acquired TomorrowNow, which provides support for products from Oracle acquisitions PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards, in January 2005. TomorrowNow may use some materials from Oracle's Customer Connection Web site, but only for certain customers covered under particular agreements.Â SAP admittedÂ that TomorrowNow did make some "inappropriate" downloads, but maintains that the information was not passed to the parent company, nor did it approve such downloads. Both companies maintain Web sites relating to the case. Oracle's can be found here, and SAP's here. Oracle had not issued a statement on the case management conference at time of writing. Â
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Open-source database to jump from beta testing to production within three months.
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PC owners who bought late last year and planned to take advantage of Microsoft's Windows Vista Express Upgrade program have found that their Vista OS upgrades are taking longer than expected to arrive. They are not amused.
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The company is shipping the open-source database for Linux and Windows to revive its usage. By Darrell Dunn. Computer Associates on Monday will take the next step in its open-source strategy with the announcement
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Oracle has again extended its $7.7 billion cash offer for PeopleSoft by two weeks. Shareholders now have until Oct. 22 to tender their shares, Oracle said Thursday.
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Buyers looking to upgrade Apple Inc.'s latest MacBook Pro laptops with a faster hard drive may be spinning their wheels for a while. Checking off that option sends shipping times from just a few days to as long as six weeks.
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Oracle again extended its tender offer for PeopleSoft to Friday, Sept. 10 at midnight, Eastern Standard Time. Oracle is offering $21 per share or about $7.
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Windows XP users interested in trying out the release candidate of Service Pack 3 for the operating system should be able to download the software later today. Be forewarned, it weighs in at 580MB.
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46 fixes coming at ya Oracle plans to release 46 security patches next week as part of its quarterly update cycle.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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Blog: The software maker said Tuesday that it is ready with a near-final "release candidate" version of its software, which will find its way on to servers later this year.
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InfoWorld - MySQL this week made available three new consulting packages that aim to help IT departments quickly design and implement open source database systems. The packages feature MySQL-certified senior consultants who work at customer sites for short-term engagements and provide in-depth application analysis as well as recommendations on application design, performance optimization, and help with migrating legacy databases to MySQL. The packages are MySQL Architecture &amp; Design, which offers two days consulting for &#36;5,000; MySQL Performance Tuning &amp; Optimization, which provides three days for &#36;7,500; and MySQL Migration Jumpstart, which includes five days consulting for &#36;10,000. MySQL also provides longer-term, customized consulting services. For more information visit www.mysql.com/consulting.