Oracle 11g - Innovate Faster

Last Wednesday, July 11th 2007, I attended the Oracle 11g Launch event in NYC. The main theme of the event was Innovation. I estimated about 1000 people were in attendance. The host was James Burke, author of "American Connections: The Founding Fathers. Networked." He had some interesting comments regarding Innovation and the evolution of data centers.

Next up was Oracle's President Charles Phillips. I have heard Mr. Phillips before, and really enjoy hearing him speak. Something I did not realize before, but this year is Oracle's 30th anniversary, and Charles had some stories and pictures from the founding team which were interesting and amusing.

Charles discussed the drivers of the development of 11g, and how closely Oracle worked with their customers on what features and improvements they wanted. Here are some if the challenges/drivers:

• Information is constantly changing
• There are more consumers of information now than ever before
• Users need real-time access to data
• An increase in security and compliance requirements
• Increasing quality of service at a lower cost
• Pressure to manage increasing rate of change

Mr. Phillips mentioned a few of the features in 11g that he thought were cool. They were:

• Advanced partitioning and compression - 2-3x compression with encryption
  
• Online upgrades and patching - also working on applications to be able to have the same ability)
• Real Application Testing - capture and replay functionality
• Data Guard - production mode can offload work to standby node
• Fast Files - fast access to unstructured media types stored in the database
  
• Total Recall - submit a query as of a certain date in the past
• RAC performance management

One of the comments (paraphrased here) by Charles about the Oracle 11g product was "...highest quality release of any product Oracle has shipped." There were also some quotes on the number of testing hours spent on the product and the number of tests performed. I really hope the product is a as strong out of the box as has been stated, but I will remain a cynic, and wait until I can get my hands on it (outside of the OAUG demos) to see if this truly is a stablke initial release.

Check out the some of the white papers on the Oracle 11g page on OTN for more details, and check here again soon for some more information from the launch event!