OracleSoft's Opening Day
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The database king finally nabs more than 90% of PeopleSoft's outstanding shares.
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Oracle Corp. is finally bringing to the North American market its Oracle E-Business Suite Special Edition, a midmarket-aimed package of pre-installed, preconfigured software from its 11i suite of business applications.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft kicked off the day-long launch of itsÂ Vista operating system,Â Office 2007 suite, andÂ Exchange Server 2007Â applications for enterprise users with events at three locations in Asia Thursday. It's the first time that new versions of Windows and Office have been launched simultaneously since 1995 and that makes it one of Microsoft's biggest launches in years. The three products became available Thursday to volume licensing customers. Consumer versions won't be available until next year. "I'm super excited about this launch today. It's been a very long journey but now I can say that we have truly arrived," said Darren Huston, president and chief executive officer of Microsoft's Japan unit. The launch, which began with an event Sydney and was followed with similar events in Tokyo and Beijing, provided Microsoft a stage from which to talk-up the three products and showcase some of the businesses that have already committed to roll-outs. Microsoft Japan already has 57 companies that have said they'll roll out at least one of the three products. The list includes some big names like Sharp, Sanyo Electric, McDonalds Holdings Company (Japan), Nikon, major electric power generator Chubu Electric Power Co., computer game maker Capcom Co., and trading company Itochu. Interest from potential usersÂ in Japan has been high, said Huston. Of 5 million downloads and 1 billion user sessions conducted as part of the beta testing for Windows Vista, about 20 percent have been by users in Japan. The country accounts for about 10 percent of the global IT market. Speaking in Tokyo Jay Jamison, leader of Microsoft's Windows business group in Japan, said, "We are hopeful and optimistic that in Japan Windows Vista will be the most successful business OS release of Windows ever." In Australia companies including BDO Chartered Accountants & Advisers and alcoholic beverage manufacturer and distributor Lion Nathan have already begun testing the products. Later Thursday Microsoft will hold launch events in Munich, London, Paris, Toronto, and New York. A consumer version of Windows Vista is due on Jan. 30 next year in many countries. (Rodney Gedda of Computerworld Australia contributed to this report)
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Oracle Corp. reported revenue and earnings growth in its first fiscal quarter, with its revenue from new software licenses rising 7 percent, to US$563 million.
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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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InfoWorld - Oracle at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco the week of Dec. 5 plans to unveil Oracle Integration, a product that combines the company&#8217;s application server with several other technologies for integration and enablement of SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
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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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At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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InfoWorld - Oracle Corp.&#39;s launch of new releases of its five application families was a surprisingly sober affair, designed to restate the vendor&#39;s May 2006 pledge to continue to enhance all of the software products.
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion â helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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Upstart database vendor EnterpriseDB plans in March to start beta-testing a version of its Oracle-compatible software that will work within Amazon.com's Web-based computing service.
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Blog: Oracle just reported its earnings for Q4 2006, and knocked the proverbial ball out of the park.  In the land of the proprietary vendors, Oracle may well be king.
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An investment approach straight from the Oracle's mouth.
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The Motley Fool - It appears that Larry Ellison took to the stage last week with more drama in mind than he had the right to perform. Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - News) really did produce a strong quarter, but the CEO may have been speaking with feet of clay when he came out strongly in regard to rival enterprise-software developer SAP (NYSE: S News). An SAP representative took the time to give me his company's side of the story, to which I've added my own Foolish touch.
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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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Oracle is now OracleSoft, and that means SAP will soon have some real competition on its hands. Oracle&#39;s recent monster user conference, the first that united its technology, database and