Oracle apps upgrade to ship within 60 days
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Oracle  customers will be able to get the delayed version of the company's E-Business Suite 11i.10 within 60 days, Oracle announced today.
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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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(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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(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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Business software maker  Oracle  Corp. ORCL.O said on Thursday it extended again its $7.7  billion hostile tender offer for PeopleSoft Inc. PSFT.O, 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 (CBS.MW) -- The starting date of PeopleSoft&#39;s billion dollar damages lawsuit against Oracle in a California state court has been pushed back to Jan. 10 from Nov. 1. Free!
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Microsoft is to give users three working days notice about upcoming security patches. Starting this month the software giant will provide a general summary of upcoming updates just before it releases patches
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A survey of Oracle Users Group attendees finds two-thirds have never applied the company's quarterly updates. Oracle set to release next update Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle will release 46 patches on Tuesday for products including its Oracle Database 10g, Application Server, and E-Business Suite. Oracle Database will get 20 fixes, two of which patch vulnerabilities that could allow remote execution of code on the network without authentication. The most serious of the database vulnerabilities is ranked "medium" in severity, according to the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, used to rank the severity of security flaws. The E-Business Suite will get 14 patches, also for vulnerabilities that could be exploited over a network without a username and password. Three of the four patches for Oracle's Application Server fix problems that could also be exploited remotely. The remaining patches are for Oracle's Collaboration Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools, PeopleSoft Enterprise Customer Relationship Management and PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management. The fixes, along with the product versions affected, are listed in an Oracle advisory. OracleÂ released 37 patchesÂ in April, its previous round of software fixes. Â
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Gennady Feldman has posted the second part of his install instructions for setting up the Oracle Instant Client (11g) and the Oracle OCI8 drivers in PHP.   This is part 2 of my installation instructions. This is my attempt to provide an updated and simplified reference. I am leaving Part 1 as is, because that part can also be useful.   This updated tutorial shows the steps to installing 11g (versus 10g in the previous example) including the packages you'll need, the commands to make it work and a PEAR version of the install if you choose to go that route.
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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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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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Business software maker Oracle Corp.  on Friday said it had decided to move forward the release date of its fiscal second-quarter earnings to Monday, Dec. 13 before markets open instead of Thursday, Dec. 16.
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InfoWorld - Oracle plans to fix dozens of flaws in its software products next Tuesday, including critical bugs in the company's database, e-business suite, and application server.
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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 - While Wednesday marked&#160;the official unveiling of Oracle&#39;s 11g database&#160;and a look at its new features, pricing and availability information was pretty thin on the ground. All the vendor would confirm is that the Linux version of 11g will ship this quarter, probably in August.
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BEA Sunday let a 5 p.m. Pacific Time deadline expire on Oracle's $6.7 million bid for the company