Orbitz, the airline-owned travel website, has suffered
an outage related to an Oracle database on which Orbitz operates
the site.
Orbitz spokeswoman Carol Jouzaitis said it was the most severe
outage to hit the online operation since the site launched about
two years ago.
Jouzaitis said the site went down early Wednesday morning (16
July) and was back up very early Thursday. She stressed that no
customer data was lost or corrupted as a result of the outage.
"It was an [Oracle] database issue, and we decided to make an
architectural change to the site, a change that will put us in a
position to move forward with even higher reliability," Jouzaitis
said. "The site is performing great now."
Jouzaitis said that as a result, Orbitz is no longer using
Oracle's 9i Real Application Clusters database software.
The Orbitz outage comes at a time when Oracle is touting its
"unbreakable" software in an extensive marketing campaign.
Unbreakable refers to a database that will not go down, even if the
server or the site fails.
Oracle is also in the midst of a hostile takeover of rival
PeopleSoft and is trying to project a customer-friendly image.
Linda Rosencrance writes for Computerworld