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Andy Mendelsohn’s Top 11g features

Last summer we brought you some favorite 11g features of Oracle DBAs from around the Web. Here at Oracle OpenWorld, Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle’s senior vice president of server technologies, didn’t have much new to announce around Oracle databases.

Oracle’s been mum on any word of 11g release 2. It is recruiting beta testers here and is releasing 11.1.07, its first enhancement to 11g, however. Of course, this all may be moot tomorrow when Larry Ellison finally reveals the “game changing” database innovation that Oracle has kept close to the vest for months.

But with nothing else to talk about yesterday during his own keynote session, Mendelsohn took the chance to look back and detail some of the top feature he thinks are convincing customers to move to 11g. By the way, Oracle insists that adoption of the new database continues across the globe, including Novartis, Eli Lilly and Intermap Technologies (look for a podcast with Intermap next week on SearchOracle.com)

Performance

“This is one of the things that’s easiest to adopt,” Mendelsohn said. “You install the release you run your applications and it runs faster.”

According to Oracle, 85% of performance metrics are better on 11g than 10g.

Partitioning

It’s been around since 8.0 but this will be very compelling for people with large databases, he said.

“Optimizer can figure out which partition tables to scan and avoid multi terabytes of data and just get the few gigabytes you need,” he said.

Compression

“This one is going to be incredibly popular with customers as they move to 11g,” Mendelsohn said.

The new compression algorithm can handle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and SAP workloads.

“We believe you can almost turn on compression on all your large applications,” he said. “At query time, performance is actually better because we’re using a deduplication algorithm not a compression algorithm that’s CPU intensive.”

Cube organized materialized views

Plan to speed up your BI tools, according to Oracle.

“The cool thing about these OLAP cube materialized views is you can create an OLAP cube for appropriate star schema and dimensions and make those queries run really fast,” Mendelsohn said.

Active data guard

An effective technology for dealing with disaster recovery, active data guard creates a duplicate copy of your database at your site or a remote site.

“The one issue people have is you can’t do a lot with your standby database,” Mendelsohn said. “It lets you offload workloads from the database so you improve the performance of the primary and reduce hardware requirements of the primary and make use of all servers you have on your standby.”

Manageability

11g is now more self tuning and self managing, according to Mendelsohn.

SQL tuning is now fully automated and takes 26% less time in 31% fewer steps, he said.

Real Application Testing

“The workload capture and replay lets you automate the process of creating a regression test for a production database,” Mendelsohn said.

Is the SQL community more open than the Oracle community?

InfoWorld blogger Sean McCown recently had his say in the Oracle vs. Microsoft SQL Server debate — and some Oracle users aren’t too happy about it.

In “The real difference between SQL Server and Oracle,” McCown writes that what most sets Microsoft apart from Oracle is the community that Microsoft has built, and the ease at which the members of this community can get the information they need.

“If you take any 10 DBAs from each side and ask them to look up a solution to a probem on their platform, the SQL guys will find the answer much faster than the Oracle guys will. And that’s just a fact. If you’re looking on specifics on how Oracle works internally, it’s almost impossible to ferret out the info, but with SQL, there are so many open resources it’s just a matter of a few minutes to [find] an answer.”

Oracle, on the other hand, is doing business the old way, and “is still living in the old days where everything is a good ole boys club,” he says. This makes it difficult for Oracle users to get sufficient direction and training.

McCowan received mixed feedback, but many Oracle users disagreed with him and defended the Oracle community. Here’s some of McCowan’s response:

“I never said there were NO forums or documentation. I said that it’s really difficult to find anything when you need it…. So the question stands: How does the Oracle community go about advertising its resources?”

From your own experiences, what do you think? How could Oracle make its resources more accessible for its customers? Or, do you think Oracle actually wins out over Microsoft? (In McCown’s words, “you’re just crazy”?)

Survey says: Database users prefer Oracle

The results are in from Evans Data Corp.’s first survey on database user preferences — and Oracle has made a clean sweep.

Oracle (version 10g or later) ranked number one in all 13 categories of the survey, which polled over 1,400 database users in December 2007.  According to Evans Data., a market research firm, most of those polled were users of several database systems. They were asked about their satisfaction with the following:

• Performance
• Security features
• Scalability
• Atomicity
• Consistency
• Isolation of transactions
• Durability of transactions
• Quality of data modeling tools
• Support for XML
• Multi platform support
• Quality of management tools included in the database
• Quality of available 3rd party management tools
• Programming language support

The closest Oracle came to any of its competitors (which included My SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2, among others) was a tie with IBM in one category.

In this InformationWeek article, Evans Data CEO John Andrews is quoted as saying: “The most glaring item that we took away from this research is that in 23 years we’ve never had one vendor come out number one in all categories.”

So, what do you think? Are you running multiple databases and surprised by these results? Which category’s win surprises you the most? Let us know your thoughts.

Salesforce.com acquisition speculation persists

With neither company willing to confirm nor deny, we can only speculate as to whether the rumored buyout of Salesforce.com by Oracle holds any truth to it. And there has been no shortage of such speculation ever since Tom Foremski, a former Financial Times reporter, posted in his Silicon Valley Watcher blog:  

“I’m hearing from a reliable source that Salesforce.com has approached Oracle to gauge if there is any interest in a sale at $75 a share.”

That single statement has sparked reaction in both the blogosphere and the stock market, with yesterday’s Salesforce.com stock shooting up almost 10%, closing out the day at $54.45 a share.

Many agree with Foremski that such a deal would make sense for Oracle. For some, this idea isn’t new — back in November, Mary Hayes Weier posted “Five Reasons Why I Think Oracle Will Buy Salesforce.com” on InformationWeek.com’s CIO blog. She points out that what Salesforce.com lacks in profit margin it makes up for in mindshare and customers. Foremski writes that by acquiring Salesforce.com, Oracle could build on its online apps and software as a service offerings, improving itself as an SAP competitor (though one could easily argue that SAP could make a bid for Salesforce.com as well).

But is this enough to convince Oracle head Larry Ellison (who already holds a majority share in Salesforce.com competitor NetSuite) to make the deal?

Cowen and Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher surely doesn’t think so. In a note to investors, he writes:

“While we would not be surprised if Salesforce made such an overture, we would be very surprised if Oracle didn’t laugh them out of the building.”

Maybe Oracle will surprise us with an announcement in the coming weeks. But it seems almost just as likely that this rumor is just that — a rumor — and will quietly fade into the background. If Oracle doesn’t buy Salesforce.com in the near future, it may be very likely that someone else will (think SAP, Google, or Microsoft). After all, Oracle is done acquiring all the large companies…right?