Oracle readies major app server upgrade
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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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Oracle is bringing out new versions of all of its business applications, including World -- a suite of green-screen software that hasn't been upgraded with a major new release since 1998.
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Sybase Inc. released a new version of its application development tool on Monday, called PowerBuilder 10, and outlined plans for an upgrade to its database software, Adaptive Server Enterprise, which will go into beta at the end of this month and is due for release next year.
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Oracle Application Server 10g is an application platform suite that offers full support for J2EE, high-speed caching, rapid application development, enterprise portals, identity management, business intelligence, application and business integration
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At Oracle OpenWorld, the database software giant touts the application server aimed at midsize companies.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun is announcing Monday the release of the GlassFish version 2 open-source application server, which features enterprise-level capabilities for running large-scale applications. The company also will offer a beta release of the upcoming open-source NetBeans 6.0 IDE, which accommodates scripting languages. While the first version of GlassFish was intended for developers, the follow-up release due Monday is intended to place GlassFish in the vein of an enterprise-level application server. Highlighted capabilities include clustering, data replication, and centralized administration of server clusters. Improved interoperability between Web services hosted on Java and Microsoft also is featured as part of a Web services stack dubbed "Project Metro." "This is an outgrowth of our relationship with Microsoft," said Ken Drachnik, Sun open-source community marketing manager. The "Open ESB" capability in version 2 enables integration of Web services and existing enterprise resources. Java Business Integration support provides a standardized approach to delivering SOA via Web services, Sun said. Performance also has been dramatically improved with version 2, according to Sun. GlassFish version 2 is based on Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5. Sun will base its own commercially supported application server, Sun Java System Application Server 9.1, on GlassFish version 2. It will feature an approximately 75 percent price reduction to $4,500 for an annual subscription for four sockets. Sun rivals in the application server space, including JBoss and BEA Systems, have participated in the GlassFish development community because they can leverage technologies available in it, such as the application server's JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding) technology, Sun officials said. GlassFish version 2's performance was lauded by analyst Joe Niski of the Burton Group. "I think the performance improvements are pretty good," said Niski, who also mentioned the clustering capabilities as worthwhile. "The basic J2EE application servers are getting more and more commoditized. There are so many free ones out there. This provides really commercial-level performance and scalability to basically a free offering," said Niski. GlassFish has served as reference implementation of Java. It also has been integrated with the NetBeans IDE, allowing developers to deploy SOA applications using business process execution language workflows. With NetBeans 6.0, the IDE moves beyond its Java origins to accommodate scripting languages, JavaScript and Ruby in particular. "The Ruby support is very important because it allows us to really talk to an entirely new segment of developers," said Gregg Sporar, NetBeans evangelist at Sun. "We have room inside the tent for more than just Java developers," Sporar said. The Matisse GUI builder in NetBeans 6.0 supports the Swing framework for building desktop applications and Beans Binding for modifying user interface controls to accommodate back-end data source changes. Also, the code editor in 6.0 has been rewritten and optimized. The profiler, for checking performance problems like memory leaks, now enables developers to stop execution of an application so they can examine what is happening within the program. Version 6.0 integrates with the Subversion version control system. General availability for NetBeans 6.0 is planned for the end of this year. The IDE first was offered in an early-access format at the JavaOne conference in May. Future distributions of NetBeans, starting with the production release of version 6.0, will be offered under either the Common Development and Distribution License or the GNU GPL (General Public License) version 2. Extending NetBeans to GPL is expected to make the platform more attractive to Linux developers.
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A new version of the popular open-source, object-relational enterprise database PostgreSQL was released that features more than 200 improvements aimed at making the application easier to use.
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Not to be outdone by rival Oracle, BEA Systems has unveiled version 9.0 of its WebLogic Server application server. Homing in on the theme of service-oriented architecture deployment, BEA said the product would
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IBM&#39;s new top-end Power5-based Unix server has a commanding lead in a performance test of servers running a large database. A $16.7 million configuration of the company&#39;s eServer p5-595 performed 3.21 million
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InfoWorld - Oracle is making a number of moves to improve access management and other security features for its users.
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InfoWorld - Sun is announcing Monday the release of the GlassFish version 2 open-source application server, which features enterprise-level capabilities for running large-scale applications.
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NOVEMBER 18, 2004  - Oracle Corp. today announced that it is moving to a quarterly patch release schedule in response to user demands for a more predictable process for applying needed security fixes to the company&#39;s software.
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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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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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Microsoft Corp. has released a major update to its server operating system designed to make the product more stable and secure.
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(InfoWorld) - OracleÂ is hoping thatÂ new security, testing, and management featuresÂ offered in Oracle Database 11g, will lead users to migrate to the major release of the vendor's database sooner rather than later. Unveiled Wednesday in an event in New York, 11g is Oracle's successor to the 10g releases 1 and 2 of its database. The vendor shipped the first release of 10g in February 2004. The company has worked closely with customers over the course of a lengthy beta testing program, which began in September, and some of those users noted that it had been hard to pin Oracle down on a launch date for 11g. The vendor onlyÂ publicly committed to July 11Â as the database's coming-out party just over a month ago. "Oracle was a little bit more cautious, wanting to make sure they got the product right," said Ari Kaplan, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), which was heavily involved in the 11g beta testing program. IOUG members are bullish on their plans to move to the new database. A recent poll of around 400 of them indicated that 35 percent of respondents planned to upgrade to 11g within a year of its release, with an additional 53 percent looking to move to the new database in the next few years, according to Kaplan. This is an improvement on previous surveys about earlier Oracle releases, where the same percentage looked to migrate within the first 18 months following a new version of the database. Kaplan was particularly interested in the improved integration of 11g with Oracle's Audit Vault and Database Vault software. "There's a key flaw with all databases," he said. "If they're smart, a DBA [database administrator] can modify data and cover their tracks" since DBAs tend to have unlimited access to databases. The technologies in Oracle's vaulting software make that impossible since every action a DBA executes effectively "goes into a lockbox that they are powerless to modify," Kaplan added. Wachovia hopes to complete its internal process to certify 11g for use within the organization by the end of the year and then to have its migration efforts well under way in 2008, according to Ed Mulheren, senior database administrator at the financial services company. He said that the improved security features in 11g will help Wachovia meet the ever-increasing regulatory demands in the financial services market. Mulheren also welcomes smaller additions like 11g's support of case-sensitive passwords, which brings security for the Oracle database more in line with Wachovia's security policies for its Windows desktops. It also means that users have to remember fewer passwords, he said. Arup Nanda, senior director of database engineering and architecture at Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, expects his organization will move to 11g in 2008. The hotel chain runs its main business on the HP-UX operating system on top of Itanium-powered computers and the 11g beta wasn't available on that platform. "So, we will have to settle for the production release later this year and then at least six months of testing after that," he wrote in an e-mail comment. Starwood uses Oracle's database for almost all of its business processes including reservations, check-in and out processes and guest loyalty programs. He singles out the Database Replay and SQL Performance Analyzer features as giving customers "the biggest bang for the buck." Other useful functionalities include the Transparent Tablespace Encryption, Virtual Columns and Partitioning enhancements, Nanda added. There are several features he would've liked to see in 11g including the ability to make a tablespace read only when there are active transactions in the database on different tablespaces. Mike Amble, senior vice president of operations and engineering at Fidelity National Information Services Inc., sees the new Fast Files feature as particularly useful to his organization. The company provides technologies to financial institutions and handles mortgage loan processing. "We tend to deal with a lot of odd forms of information," he said. For instance, when a house is sold, all the documents related to the sale including appraisals and title documents are sent back to the mortgage company in paper form and then scanned and stored. Fast Files will allow users to store large objects like images in the 11g database as fast as storing such unstructured information in traditional file systems. Like other beta testers, Amble also welcomes Real Application Testing, the ability for customers to effectively record a segment of their database operations and then use and replay that recording as a testing environment instead of having to spend months creating a testbed. Amble hopes to migrate his organization over to 11g in 2008. "In the beta testing, we've not found a lot of issues, it should be a very easy transition," he said. One area where he'd like to see Oracle become more open is in enabling the management of multiple encryption tools, both Oracle and third-party software. Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies at Oracle, estimated that more than 1,500 developers and technicians have worked on 11g. The company engaged in a "huge amount of testing," he said, running the beta software on Oracle's server farm of more than 2,000 processors. The company already has a parallel development project under way to work on 11g release 2. One area not mentioned in the listing of 11g's new features is grid computing, that's what the "g" in both 10g and 11g stands for. "We're doing a lot of work in grid technologies for the next release, which will make grid infrastructure even easier to adopt," Mendelsohn said. Mendelsohn also confirmed earlier reports that Oracle won't be rushing to bring out an 11g update for its free Express Edition (XE) database. The new version will likely come with the release of 11g release 2. According to Gartner Inc.'s latest figures released in June, Oracle was the worldwide market leader in the relational database management system market with a 47.1 percent share, trailed by rivals IBMÂ in second place with 21.1 percent of the market and Microsoft in third position with a 17.4 percent share. Back in April, fellow analyst IDC's initial 2006 figures painted much the same picture. "We don't really worry about the competition," said Charles Phillips, Oracle's president. "We have such a lead." Oracle's challenge is how fast it can meet its customers' needs, he added. He dismissed IBM as deriving 90 percent of their database revenue from mainframe and Microsoft as being "regulated to Windows." Oracle offers its database on a number of operating systems, including Linux. Â
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Oracle  will release 46 patches on Tuesday for products including its Oracle Database 10g, Application Server and E-Business Suite.