Oracle on Thursday discussed what it called the final pieces of its
forthcoming 9i database, which promises to make the software more
self-tuning and reduce associated maintenance costs.
When 9i ships on June 14, it will include memory management,
storage management, and resource management functionality. "The
entire industry has been moving toward more self-tuning databases,"
said Bob Shimp, Oracle's senior director of marketing.
Indeed, IBM, Microsoft, NCR, and Sybase, to name a few, have also
been working on systems that will require less maintenance on the
part of database administrators. Sybase CEO John Chen has said that
in time, databases will become almost zero-maintenance systems that
only need to be installed, then tweaked occasionally.
"It's good that Oracle is going in the direction of self-tuning. A
lot of the complaints about them were that it was tricky to use,
but they've come a long way in terms of usability," said Peter
Urban, a senior analyst at AMR Research. "Anything they can do to
improve usability is key."
In addition to making the database easier to use, Shimp said that
the self-tuning features will reduce the overall cost of operating
an Oracle database. Oracle was criticised recently for its
universal power unit pricing model.
Last August, consultancy Meta Group published a report stating that
Oracle is three to five times more expensive than IBM's DB2. AMR's
Urban, however, expects that the self-tuning features will help
Oracle users keep costs down in the long run. "They still have to
work on that up-front price, but the more significant costs are the
ongoing ones," he said.
According to Shimp, internal Oracle testing suggests that 9i can
reduce database management costs by as much as 40%. "With these
features you can add more users to the same size database," Shimp
added.
Real Application Clusters, a feature Oracle introduced at its
October OpenWorld show in San Francisco, also contributes to the
overall scalability of 9i by enabling customers to string together
servers for processing power. "We use both the scale-up and the
scale-out approach," Shimp said.
AMR's Urban said that Real Application Clusters will help elevate
Oracle to the scalability level of NCR and IBM.
"Previously, they could latch multiple servers together, but now
clustering for scalability is much easier," he added.
In terms of scalability, Oracle clearly is aiming for the sky. In
fact, CEO Larry Ellison said at OpenWorld that with the pending
release Oracle is gunning to achieve 1 million simultaneous users,
1 million page views per second, and 1 million TPC-Cs. TPC-C is the
benchmark for database performance that is run by the Transaction
Processing Performance Council, in San Francisco.
The current record for most TPC-Cs belongs to IBM running a Windows
2000 Datacenter Server and SQL Server 2000 clustered configuration
and is 688,220 transactions per minute.
"We're going to try and illustrate those capabilities," Shimp said.
He added that Oracle is saving the specific numbers for the formal
launch.
The company said on Thursday that it will announce 9i on June 14,
at which point the database will become available. Oracle has said
for several months that customer will be able to purchase 9i in the
first half of this year.
Last week Ellison publicly slated May 15 as the announcement date,
and Oracle planned to hold a formal event that day at its
headquarters. But the database giant decided to hold off until June
14, saying it made more sense to host a formal event when the
product is finished and available.