By Carol King, internetnews.com
Oracle Corp. Tuesday launched Oracle9i, a new version of its
flagship database.
The product, which is aimed at e-businesses, boasts a patented
cache-fusion cluster technology. The technology aims to produce
linear scalability and reliability by quickly sharing frequently
accessed data across all the servers in a cluster, resolving all
manners of contention between servers in the process.
As e-businesses move to consolidate global IT infrastructure and
bring all of their customers, employees and suppliers online,
Oracle9i aims to provide a transparent way for e-business
applications to take place, according to Chuck Rozwat, executive
vice president of server technologies at Oracle.
“The database redefines quality of service, allowing new and
existing businesses to transparently scale their infrastructure and
never compromise reliability,” he said. “In addition, Oracle9i’s
unique embedded OLAP and data mining capabilities ensure that not
just the biggest and the best Web sites run on Oracle, but also the
most personalized.”
Crucial to the product’s performance, is:
- Dynamic Web content syndication.
- Internet-scale business intelligence.
- A data guard that offers zero data loss due to human error and
disaster recovery capabilities. - A flashback query that enables self-service recovery from human
error by enabling users and applications to quickly access
data. - A proxy authentification technology that verifies the user
throughout the most complex, multi-tiered environments. - A virtual private database with security labels.
- A self-tuning and self-managing database.
The new database additionally offers unprecedented speed, the
company says. In fact, the company has backed that claim with a
million-dollar challenge aimed at commercial product Web sites.
“Our new Oracle9i Application Server has an integrated Web Cache
that’s so fast, we think it will dramatically increase the
performance of your Web site,” according to a company statement.
“In fact, we are so confident in the performance of our new Oracle
9i Application Server and our Oracle8i Database that we make the
following performance guarantee:
“If you have an existing commercial production Web site based on
IBM DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server database technology, and you
replace your IBM or Microsoft technology with the Oracle9i
Application Server and the Oracle8i Database, we guarantee that
your Web site will run three times faster than it currently
does.
“By this, we mean that your Web site will be able to support at
least three times as many page views per second as your old IBM or
Microsoft based Web site. If your Web site does not run at least
three times faster than before the change to Oracle technology, we
will pay you $1,000,000.”
Oracle’s Web site, oracle.com, has the complete conditions of
this challenge.
The new product was unveiled at Oracle OpenWorld 2000, the
company’s own e-business conference. Shipping is anticipated to
begin during the first quarter of 2001.