31.10.08

Wipro implements Oracle's Peoplesoft in J&K Bank

Wipro Infotech, the IT business arm of Wipro Ltd, today announced that it has implemented Oracle's Peoplesoft Enterprise Human Capital Management 9.0 for Jammu and Kashmir Bank.

It will help streamline the HR management of the bank, which has an employee strength of more than 8,000. It will also enable the cutting down of paper work to a major extent and reduction of manual work thereby lending alacrity to HR processes, Wipro said in a statement said.

"As a result of this implementation all the zones and branches are connected to the centralised HR system and a fully customised claims management system has been deployed to facilitate the claims process, which also includes an interface to Oracle's Peoplesoft Enterprise Payroll," it added.

Some of the modules implemented by Wipro include Talent Acquisition Manager and Candidate Gateway (Recruitment), Administer Training, eDevelopment, ePerformance, eProfile Manager Desktop, eProfile, Profile Management, Global Payroll for India, Absence Management and Approval Workflow Engine.

Source: www.tmcnet.com


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30.10.08

Oracle buys Aussie Ruleburst

Enterprise software giant Oracle has purchased Australian-owned independent software vendor Ruleburst, owners of the Haley suite of compliance software products, for an undisclosed sum.

The Haley suite of products automates the enforcing of business rules within applications. The company says its software is used by large organisations to "prevent, detect and cure breaches in compliance with legislation, policy and business rules".

RuleBurst, based in Sydney, also has operations in the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore.

According to a statement released by Oracle, the company intends to create a new software solution based on the combination of the Haley platform with Oracle's ERP and Siebel CRM applications.

The ISV's staff will form a new business division within Oracle aimed at "enterprise policy automation".

Haley's CEO Dominic O'Hanlon will lead this team as senior vice president and general manager.

Author: Brett Winterford, ZDNet.com.au


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27.10.08

Mideast biggest market for Oracle

The leading database and infrastructure solutions company, Oracle, said the Middle East share for its products is the highest in the world and that it has a great potential.

"The region enjoys the highest market share in the world and is therefore a strategic region for Oracle," said Charles Phillips, President of Oracle Corporation on his first trip to Dubai and the region, at a roundtable held with journalists at Gitex.

Phillips was upbeat on the region's performance and also the customers based in the region. "Over the past three days I have met customers in Dubai and also travelled to Abu Dhabi and am really impressed with the knowledge of clients based in the region. The customers are also proud of working with Oracle and have great stories to tell. The energy is good here as there is a lot of growth potential."

Oracle was an active participant at Gitex. Husam Dajani, Senior Vice President MEA, present at the event said: "We have been participating at Gitex for many years and there has been a continuity in our relationship with customers and consultants. This also shows that we understand all the verticals in the region and have covered all of them."

Though the vendor is on the top in database, middleware, applications and infrastructure solutions, Phillips said there are many customers who have not implemented all ERP modules and had not standardised all the divisions within the company. Dajani said: "Many clients don't have modern CRM systems and require different ways of communications. Therefore these customers require a common experience to grow.

"There are also specialised industries which require unique solutions and also have to move to commercial solutions like Oracle".

He cited the example of the insurance industry, which requires mission critical solutions to make quick decisions and therefore partners need to develop their skills to target these industries. "Its not database anymore but also middleware and a whole lot of applications around that.

"Even banks are looking for modern platforms especially the ones in this part of the world as they don't have legacy systems. Asia and Middle East is definitely faster in adopting technologies compared to their European counterpart," he said.

Oracle's president claimed that the company had no competition on the database front, as close competitor Microsoft was not interested. "Microsoft seems to have lost interest as they are busy chasing Google in the consumer space, while we are very clear that our focus is on enterprise," Phillips said.

On the applications front, he said, SAP was a strong competitor but Oracle was now leading in that space.

"Though IBM is present in enterprise their approach has changed as we are more of partners than competitors. They are focused more on services and loosing market share in database," said Phillips.

Author: Nancy Sudheer @ www.business24-7.ae


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24.10.08

Oracle Financial Services Software net up 7%

Oracle Financial Services Software (formerly known as i-flex), reported net income of Rs 93.4 crore for the second quarter up 6.8 per cent as compared to Rs 87.4 crore in the corresponding quarter in the previous year.

Revenue for this quarter grew 23 per cent to touch Rs 707.4 crore as compared to Rs 575.8 crore for the corresponding quarter last financial year.

Sequentially, the net income of the company dropped 11.5 per cent from Rs 105.6 crore--but revenue were up 11.8 per cent from Rs 631.8 crore.

The company signed new license fees of $27.4 million in the quarter and added 16 new customers across product and services business spanning across multiple geographies.

“Our past investments have helped grow products license fees by 55 per cent, compared to the same period last year. The overall revenue stream is well diversified geographically. The combination of domain knowledge and technology leadership of Oracle allows us to address banks’ current and future needs in ways that no other vendor can,” said N R K Raman, Managing Director and CEO, Oracle Financial Services Software Limited.

Source: www.business-standard.com


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21.10.08

Oracle told by judge to offer to settle with SAP

BOSTON (Reuters) - A U.S. federal judge told Oracle Corp to propose a financial settlement in a lawsuit that the software giant filed against rival SAP AG in which Oracle has claimed that damages may top $1 billion.

Oracle filed the claim against the German software maker in March 2007, accusing SAP's U.S.-based TomorrowNow services unit of illegally using customer log-ins to steal copyrighted materials from Oracle's website.

Federal Judge Joseph Spero asked Redwood City, California-based Oracle to tell SAP how much money it wants to settle the case by February 13. The German software maker will have until February 18 to come up with a counter offer, according to the order that was issued in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Monday.

Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger declined comment. SAP spokesman Saswato Das said his company would cooperate with the court's request.

California courts regularly require parties in civil lawsuits attempt to settle before they go to court.

SAP had disclosed in July 2007 that TomorrowNow employees made "some inappropriate downloads" of materials from Oracle's website.

But SAP officials have repeatedly declined to elaborate on that comment, saying the facts will be reviewed by the court.

SAP is in the process of shutting down TomorrowNow after an unsuccessful bid to sell the company.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle, Editing by Ben Tan)


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16.10.08

Oracle joins patch party

Company issues 36 security fixes. Oracle has issued a massive security update for twenty of its enterprise computing offerings.

The update encompasses all supported copies of Oracle Database, Application Server, E-Business Suite, People Soft Enterprise, JD Edwards, WebLogic Server and Workshop for WebLogic.

Fifteen of the security patches address issues in the company's flagship Database software. Only one, however, would allow an attacker to remotely access a database system without authorization. The update will not need to be installed on machines running the client version of the database software.

The remainder of the security patches were distributed evenly amongst the other applications. Included in the update are fixes for a pair of remotely-exploitable flaws in Application Server and two in the E-Business Suite offering.

The company is strongly recommending that administrators apply the updates as soon as possible in order to avoid a potentially serious attack or data leak.

Oracle's patch release could lead to a busy week for IT departments. The release of the Oracle update comes just one day after Microsoft issued the October edition of its monthly security update which included critical fixes for Windows, Office and Internet Explorer.

Author: Shaun Nichols @ www.vnunet.com


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14.10.08

Vertica says Oracle compatibility, other features will help it win more BI users

Column-based database start-up Vertica Systems Inc.'s strategy of trying to supplement rather than usurp customers' data warehouses appears to be paying off.

The Billerica, Mass.-based company, which began selling its software just a year and a half ago, brought in $20 million in revenue in the past four quarters, said Dave Menninger, vice president of marketing, last week.

Vertica announced the release of Version 2.5 of its namesake database just half a year after the release of Version 2.0 in March.

Version 2.5 adds features such as the ability to design data warehouses in a number of schemas, and enhancements to SQL -- especially compatibility with Oracle's version of SQL. That will make it easier for customers to port existing applications written for their Oracle databases or data warehouses over to Vertica, Menninger said.

Version 2.5 also adds custom data partitioning, hot backup and an intelligent query router so that applications can automatically search for data whether it is located inside the Vertica data mart or the main enterprise data warehouse.

The company has 50 customers, including a financial services firm that Vertica signed up last month. That customer is Vertica's largest to date, Menninger said, though he declined to name the firm.

Vertica's bread-and-butter is what the company calls a "teramart," a specially built high-speed data mart that is an adjunct to the main data warehouse and analyzes a certain segment of data, typically multiple terabytes in size.
Many of its customers are in the telecom or financial markets, and competition is heating up. Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Teradata Inc. all have announced major new BI-focused upgrades in the past month or so.

Customers can buy Vertica one of three ways. Most simply, they can license the database to run on Linux servers. A small number buy the software preinstalled on server appliances built by Hewlett-Packard Co. or Sun Microsystems Inc. Licensing the database or buying it on an appliance both cost the same: about $100,000 per terabyte of user data, Menninger said.

That means a teramart of only 10TB costs $1 million. That figure appears expensive compared with Vertica's competitors' offerings in the large and high-performance business intelligence market. Netezza Inc. reportedly charges about $29,000 per terabyte, while GreenPlum Inc. charges about $20,000 per terabyte of user data.

But Menninger said he doesn't expect the company to have to respond with price cuts. Vertica is "saving customers money," he said. "Despite the fact that the economy is struggling, our business has been accelerating."

Price-sensitive customers can opt for a third option introduced in May: running a Web-hosted version of Vertica from Amazon.com's EC2. That option starts at $500 per month for 500GB of data.

Vertica has no plans to create its own set of BI analysis and reporting tools. "Our goal is to use standard interfaces to hook in as well as possible with existing products in the market," Menninger said.

Author: Eric Lai @ www.computerworld.com


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13.10.08

Oracle stands tall in database software

Question: Should I brace for the worst with my shares of Oracle Corp.?

-- D.L., via the Internet

Answer: Like all technology firms, it is facing weakened economies in the United States and abroad that have a negative impact on the companies that typically buy its products.

Oracle shares are down 12 percent this year following last year's 32 percent increase and a 40 percent gain in 2006. The company has expressed caution about its near-term prospects.

Nonetheless, its dominant position in database software gives it a degree of pricing power most other technology companies can only dream about. At midyear it enacted 15 percent to 20 percent across-the-board price increases for its U.S. customers.

It also possesses the solid finances and cash flow to grow by acquiring companies, having spent more than $30 billion during the past three years to buy smaller software firms. Its $8.5 billion acquisition of BEA Systems closed in April.

The company's market share in database software, which is the foundation of every information system, edged up to 49 percent last year from 48 percent in 2006, according to the Gartner market research firm. IBM ranked second at 21 percent and Microsoft third with 18 percent.

Oracle also is gaining ground in enterprise software, those integrated applications that support and streamline business activities. It has lately expanded into applications for the insurance and health-care industries.

Presence in a variety of information technology areas allows it to offer "one-stop shopping" to companies that prefer not to have to deal with multiple providers.

Consensus rating of Oracle shares by Wall Street analysts is "buy," according to Thomson Financial, consisting of 11 "strong buys," 10 "buys," six "holds" and three "underperforms."

The company faces increased competition from lower-cost support providers for Oracle products. Germany's SAP is a formidable foe and the leader in business applications, and Oracle's database software is a maturing business.

Earnings are expected to be up 15 percent for the current fiscal year ending in May and 15 percent for the next fiscal year.

Q: I am unhappy with my shares of Fidelity Value Discovery Fund. Are they still worth holding?

-- P.F., via the Internet

A: Recent events haven't been kind to its portfolio, which emphasizes financial stocks. Trimming back some energy holdings didn't help either.

Nonetheless, its significant holdings in JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. represent surviving banks that avoided most of the excesses of their peers. The fund also adroitly trimmed back its General Electric Co. stock because of the company's stressed financial business.

All this requires that an investor look beyond near-term results to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The fund, which is able to move around various market capitalizations, has an overall strategy of investing in securities undervalued in relation to a firm's assets, sales, earnings, growth or cash flow.

The $1 billion Fidelity Value Discovery Fund is down 45 percent during the past 12 months to rank in the lowest one-third of large growth and value funds. Its three-year annual return of a 7 percent loss places it in the top one-fourth of its peers.

"I currently have Fidelity Value Discovery rated as a 'hold,' " said Jack Bowers, editor of the independent Fidelity Monitor newsletter in Rocklin, Calif. "I think probably the worst is over and, though we're not there yet, at some point the financial sector will outperform."

The fund has been managed since its December 2002 inception by Scott Offen, who previously managed several of Fidelity's industry funds. Although he is an accomplished stock picker, he is not yet one of the investment firm's most proven managers. Because Offen doesn't hang on to winners forever because he sees downside risk in doing so, the portfolio tends to have high turnover.

This "no-load" (no sales charge) fund requires a $2,500 minimum initial investment and has an annual expense ratio of 0.87 percent.

Author: Andrew Leckey @ Tribune Media Services


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10.10.08

Oracle Acquires Primavera

Oracle has announced that it is to acquire Primavera, a software company that focuses on enterprise project portfolio management, PPM. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition follows Oracle’s moves to expand its services, transport, and construction, STC, business. While Oracle already has a significant existing client base in project-intensive industries, through a combination of core technology assets, middleware, Siebel, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Agile, there is still heavy supplier fragmentation in those markets.

By acquiring Primavera, it has started to arm its salesforce with stronger arguments to push for highly lucrative enterprise licensing agreements.

Source: www.computerwire.com


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7.10.08

Oracle Falls After SAP Says Global Crisis Hurt Sales (Update1)

Oracle Corp., the world's second- largest software maker, fell in Nasdaq trading after rival SAP AG warned its sales growth will trail forecasts as customers put orders on hold amid the global financial crisis.

Oracle dropped $1.18, or 6.1 percent, to $18.30 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have declined 19 percent this year.

SAP tumbled 16 percent in Frankfurt trading after saying a ``very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity'' will lead to lower-than-anticipated earnings this quarter. Last month, Oracle forecast profit that beat analysts' estimates, reassuring investors a worsening economy wasn't eroding profit.

"SAP's miss today is causing some investors to worry the economy may catch up with Oracle'' this quarter, said Pat Walravens, an analyst with JMP Securities in San Francisco.

Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison has spent more than $34.5 billion on acquisitions since 2005 to add customers who buy maintenance contracts, relying on those support fees to preserve profit as technology spending slows. Such fees account for more than half of sales.

Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Oracle, didn't respond to an e-mail and phone call seeking comment today. The Redwood City, California-based company said Sept. 18 that second-quarter profit will climb to as much as 36 cents a share, excluding some costs. Analysts in a Bloomberg survey at the time estimated 35 cents on average for the period, which ends Nov. 30.

SAP is based in Walldorf, Germany.

To contact the reporter on this story: Connie Guglielmo in San Francisco at cguglielmo1@bloomberg.net


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6.10.08

Oracle Faces Database Patent Suit

Australian Financial Systems Technology, FST, has filed a patent suit against Oracle in the US District Court of Texas, alleging the company infringed two of its patents related to enterprise database management systems.

The company alleges that Oracle is infringing versions 8i, 9i, 10g, and 11g of its management system, and is claiming damages and an injunction against Oracle from using its technology. Last month, the US Patent and Trademark Office affirmed the validity of FST's two patents.

Source: www.computerwire.com


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3.10.08

Oracle invests in its vision of social networks

Oracle's unexpected move into the hardware business, with the launch of storage and database products, has intrigued industry observers, writes Karlin Lillington in San Francisco

SOCIAL NETWORKING and a venture into hardware were the newcomers to Oracle's ever-increasing products universe last week at the company's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Most surprising was Oracle's unexpected move into the hardware business with the launch of two products, a storage server called Exadata, and a new ultra high speed "database machine".

Both are produced in conjunction with HP, whose chief executive Mark Hurd appeared onstage with Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison by video link to promote the joint venture.

Ellison said during his keynote address that the Exadata storage server would offer better performance speeds than traditional storage servers because it sifts data before transferring it over to a database server.

Ellison also launched the Oracle Database Machine - a grid, or multiple computer package of Exadata and database servers contained in a large rack - which he said was "the world's fastest database machine".

The two products bring the software company directly into the data warehousing market, and places Oracle in competition with hardware makers such as Sun Microsystems, EMC and IBM.

Some analysts felt the products would address a gap in the market for hardware that can more efficiently run database software. But others felt Oracle was coming late to a market full of formidable competition from some of the most powerful hardware companies.

On the application front, the company's major launch was Beehive, a collaboration software suite that utilises and manages many of the trendier social networking ("Web 2.0") technologies, such as wikis, forums, and online messaging.

Beehive, which incorporates some of Oracle's earlier collaboration products, was either new window-dressing for so-so products from Oracle's past, or a total overhaul that will bring Web 2.0 into the corporate world, depending on who one listened to.

"One of the things that we heard back from our customers was that, while all these [Web 2.0 technologies] exist, there's no integration for those products," said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice-president of Oracle server technologies. "Integration is one of the things we thought we could bring to the market to make it a lot easier for end users and whole lot easier for administrators."

Analyst firm Gartner remained unimpressed, however: "After two unsuccessful forays into the collaborative market, Oracle is back . . . Gartner believes Beehive is unlikely to be any more successful than previous efforts."

Mark Brown, senior director of collaboration business strategy at Oracle, countered that "Beehive is a new product, not an e-mail platform that's 10-15 years old . . .It isn't an upgrade to Oracle Collaboration Suite 10." Collaboration and security are the product's hallmarks, he stressed.

Europe and the entire EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) market continues to be very strong for Oracle, said Sergio Giacoletto, Oracle's executive vice-president, EMEA. He said that EMEA experienced 34 per cent revenue growth, to $7.9 billion, in the financial year 2008, with 5.7 per cent growth in its database market and 14.4 per cent growth in middleware, according to figures from Gartner.

While the company had seen a 23 per cent drop in EMEA applications sales in the first quarter of the 2009 financial year, Giacoletto insisted this was just a quarterly variation and "no particular issue".

He noted that the company was seeing growth in EMEA in its two new business units, taxation and insurance, "especially in emerging markets". The company's strongest growth is in Russia, Turkey and the Middle East, he said, but noted that in the first quarter, it had been Germany. Growth "may vary from quarter to quarter, but in general, in the Middle East and Africa growth is faster than in western Europe."

Nonetheless, he said that Oracle's push for open standards in some areas of its product line was "important" in Europe, where the European Commission and many individual national governments support open standards and free and open source software projects.

Giacolletto said Oracle's broad product and services portfolio put it in a good position to weather any downturn, and added the company had little presence in the troubled banking sector.

In one of the event's guest keynotes, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini had his own message for the financial world. He said that, hypothetically, if a trader on the New York Stock Exchange had been running a system with Intel's latest, much faster Dunnington processor, it could have saved the trader $33 million in a critical five-minute window on September 15th, when the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 218 points.

Too bad the processor was only introduced in the last two weeks.

The buzz on 'Beehive': customers interested

WHILE MANY analysts initially questioned Oracle's large-scale acquisition strategy, customers seem to be generally happy with the breadth of offerings, with some finding they already used the same products when they weren't under Oracle's roof, anyway.

Take Jonathan Ebsworth, a vice president at consultancy CapGemini in Britain, who advises on information technology for large enterprise customers.

"What we've got now from Oracle is a very clear product strategy with a very rich feature selection," he says.

He's "excited about the hybrid Oracle technologies and the applications" now coming from the company.

"I see Oracle as having best-of-breed middleware [software that connects different programs together] and a huge amount of [application] content" that can be used in services-oriented architecture (SOA), ways of connecting applications to address specific business functions and institutional processes.

For his central government clients, Ebsworth feels the service-enabled applications "should allow us to define solutions more quickly".

However, he would like to see "something more compelling in terms of the interconnection between data".

In particular, he'd like "things to talk to things".

As for the new Web 2.0, social networking software emerging from Oracle, such as the new "Beehive" application launched at OpenWorld, Alex de Vergori, database architect with UK online betting site Betfair, is very interested, but also more cautious.

"I think it [Beehive] is a great idea - but it remains to be seen how it works," he says.

He notes that Betfair incorporates instant messaging, forums, wikis and other social networking technologies already, and believes these are a key element in generating customer betting activity.

"We use all those and it would be nice to use it [to tie them together]."

Ebsworth is a little more reserved. While CapGemini is quite interested in using such technologies internally, among clients they "are on the corporate agenda, but a lot of organisations are seeing that as aspirational rather than something you do right now."

He adds: "It's a journey we're all pretty much at the start of, rather than well down the track."

Source: www.irishtimes.com


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2.10.08

Oracle To Buy Advanced Visual Technology

The retail software maker's products help store owners decide how to arrange stores and manage retail space for best product placement.

Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) on Wednesday agreed to acquire the British firm Advanced Visual Technology, a supplier of 3-D space-planning software for retailers.

The terms of the deal weren't disclosed. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year.

Advanced Visual Technology can present a photo-realistic view of individual stores, then allow a retailer to work with suppliers and partners to design the floor space around the product lines available, Oracle said in announcing the acquisition. Retail is a vertical application market that Oracle has targeted since its acquisition of Retek in 2004 and, more recently, 360Commerce in January.

Oracle is competing with SAP in the retail applications space and is expected to continue to buy application suppliers in the retail space. Up-front applications, such as Advanced Visual Technology, help store owners decide how to arrange stores and manage retail space for best product placement. Such applications are expected to be integrated in the future with Oracle's back-end applications that analyze sales data and project where consumers are spending their money.

Advanced Visual Technology supplements Oracle's financials and back-end business intelligence with storefront "boots on the ground" retail know-how, said Stuart Williams, analyst with Technology Business Research.

Existing Oracle applications cover retail merchandising, inventory, point of service, returns handling, promotion optimization, and master data management.

Employees of AVT will join Oracle's Retail Global Business Unit.

Author: Charles Babcock @ www.informationweek.com


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1.10.08

Oracle offers compression to DBAs

Oracle's powerful new HP Oracle Database Machine comes with 168TB of storage, a new method of retrieving data more quickly and intelligently, and - gulp- a hefty $2.33m (£1.26m) price tag.

It's the turbocharged option for the database administrator with money to burn and a need for speed.

But most DBAs don't get to drive in the fast lane - especially not with IT budgets the way they are. So as a less lavish option for enterprise users, Oracle is touting another approach. That one involves data compression, which has long been a popular way to save storage space and money. Traditionally, though, the trade-off has been high: Gobs of memory and processing power typically are needed to compress data and write it to disks. Even more is needed when the information is later extracted.

Now Oracle claims to have solved this thorny problem with a feature it first introduced in its Oracle 11g database, which was released last year.

By using the Advanced Compression option in 11g, Oracle says, DBAs can shrink database sizes by as much as three-quarters and boost read/write speeds by three to four times, no matter whether they're running a data warehouse or a transaction-processing database - all while incurring little in the way of processor utilisation penalties.

Oracle claims the storage and speed gains are so dramatic that companies using Advanced Compression will no longer need to move old, seldom or non-used data to archives. Instead, they can keep it all in the same production database, even as the amount of data stored there grows into the hundreds of terabytes or even the petabyte range.

"This works completely transparently to your applications," according to Juan Loaiza, Oracle's senior vice president of systems technologies. "It increases CPU usage by just 5 percent, while cutting your [database] table sizes by half."
Oracle says it's responding to the demands of enterprise customers with fast-growing databases. "The envelope is always being pushed," Loaiza said. "Unstructured data is growing very quickly. We expect someone to be running a one-petabyte, 1,000-CPU-core database by 2010."

It's also responding to the fact that storage technology, one of the keys to database performance, has made little progress from a speed standpoint, according to Loaiza. "Disks are getting bigger, but they're not getting a whole lot faster," he said.

Taking data compression down to the block level
Oracle has offered simple index-level compression since the 8i version of its database was introduced in 1999. That improved several years later with the introduction of table-level compression in Oracle 9i Release 2, which helped data warehousing users compress data for faster bulk loads, according to Sushil Kumar, senior director of product management for database manageability, high availability and performance at Oracle.

Advanced Compression provides even finer capabilities, letting the database compress data down to the disk-block level. The algorithm used in the new feature compresses data while keeping track of exactly where information is stored, Kumar said. The result, he claimed, is that when data is extracted by users, the database can focus in like a laser on the exact block on the disk where the information is located, instead of pulling whole tables and sifting through unwanted data.

Other compression schemes "have no idea what's on the disk," Kumar contended. "They can't read part of a document without opening up the entire one."

According to Oracle officials, Advanced Compression is also smart enough not to compress data with every single change to a database, but to instead let the changes accumulate and then run them in batches. That is efficient enough to enable Advanced Compression to work with OLTP databases, which tend to have heavy read/write volumes, said Vineet Marwah, a principal member of the Oracle database staff.

Another component of Advanced Compression, called SecureFiles, can automatically detect, index and compress non-relational data such as Word documents, PDFs or XML files, Marwah said. Oracle also has enhanced its backup compression performance so that it is 40 percent faster in 11g than in the previous version of the database, while not degrading the performance of other database functions, he said.

And because a compressed database is generally much smaller, it shrinks the flow of data between the storage server and database, where bottlenecks tend to occur, Kumar says. The gains are so dramatic that DBAs can dump their complicated partitioning and archiving schemes, he claimed. "A lot of people archive data because they have to, not because they want to," he says. "So if you see a business value in keeping data around, compression is a useful way to not let resource constraints dictate your architecture."

Oracle acknowledges that Advanced Compression isn't a cure-all. For instance, while large table scans "are a whole lot faster, compression doesn't make random-access reads that much faster," Loaiza says. Also, data that has already been compressed, such as a JPEG image, can't be compressed further, according to Kumar.

Oracle's claim of 4:1 compression also isn't the highest level in the database industry. Database analyst Curt Monash pointed out in an online post this week that analytic database start-up Vertica claims compression ratios from 5:1 to as much as 60:1, depending on the type of data.

Kumar declined to comment about Vertica. But during his OpenWorld presentation, he claimed that Oracle's variable-length, block-level compression is more efficient than what is offered in IBM's rival DB2 9 database, not to mention faster. "Because DB2 is so inefficient to begin with, Oracle is the winner any day," Kumar said. He also called the compression offered by data warehousing database vendor Teradata Corp. "very primitive."

But users haven't flocked to Advanced Compression yet. One reason is that it's a paid add-on. A licence costs $11,500 per processor, with updates and support adding an additional $2,530 per CPU. Also, it's available only to users of 11g Enterprise Edition, and Oracle hasn't seen much adoption of 11g thus far. According to Andrew Mendelsohn, Oracle's senior vice president of server technologies, 75 percent of its customers are running 10g, and another 20 percent are still running 9i.

Take what is likely Oracle's biggest customer, LGR Telecommunications, which develops data warehousing systems for telecommunications companies. LGR has built two 300TB data warehouses for AT&T for use in storing and managing the carrier's caller data records, according to Paul Hartley, general manager of LGR's North American operations in Atlanta. The databases, which run concurrently with one another, can scale up to a total of 1.2PB, says Hartley.

But the two data warehouses are based on Oracle 10g, so they can't take advantage of Advanced Compression. LGR does "use compression to some extent today, but we plan to use it extensively in the future," says Hannes van Rooven, a manager at LGR.

Another Oracle customer, Intermap Technologies, is using the spatial-data version of 11g for its 11TB database of digital mapping and imagery data, which is expected to grow to 40TB by the first quarter of 2010, according to Sue Merrigan, senior director of information management at the company. Intermap isn't in the compression camp now. "We don't compress the data because we are concerned it would lose its accuracy," Merrigan says.

That isn't true, responds Kumar, who said that Advanced Compression is a so-called lossless compression scheme.

Rivals such as John Bantleman, CEO of archiving software vendor Clearpace Software, argue that sending old data to archives will continue to boost database performance more than compressing information. Moreover, it isn't much more complicated to do so, Bantleman claims. And using tools such as Clearpace, users can search and extract data archived outside of the database as quickly and conveniently as if the information was stored in it, according to Bantleman.

"A telco might need to maintain its caller data records for years," Bantleman says. "But does it really make sense to keep all of that in your database if regulations only require you to keep access to it for 90 days?" He added that it might seem better "emotionally" to maintain a single data storage environment. "But I think you want to segment the live part of your data for OLTP performance from your highly compressed historical data. These two schemas don't meld well in the same box."

Author: Eric Lai @ www.techworld.com


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