Oracle's Project Fusion middleware strategy will be a
major focus at the UK Oracle User Group Conference in Birmingham
this week.
Oracle unveiled Project Fusion in September. The middleware
strategy aims to provide a common architecture for users of Oracle,
PeopleSoft and JD Edwards enterprise software.
The conference will include streams for PeopleSoft and JD
Edwards users, following Oracle's takeover of the software
suppliers at the beginning of this year.
Gartner analysts Simon Hayward and Lee Geishecker said last
month, "Although Oracle's intention is welcome, the reality will be
seen in its execution. Customers should require implementation
details and not rely on aspirations to openness and
standardisation."
Speaking after Fusion's launch, Debra Lilley, deputy chairwoman
at the UK Oracle User Group, told Computer Weekly, "There is
cautious excitement about Fusion and we are interested to see what
will be in it." Users can expect more details this week at the
conference.
Along with Project Fusion, one of the key trends for discussion
at the conference will be the take-up of the latest 10g release of
Oracle's relational database server. A survey due to be published
at the conference found that the number of users migrating to the
10g database server was increasing.
The 10g version of Oracle's flagship database server offers
users a way to deploy a grid of low-cost servers on which to host
the database. The benefit of the grid is that the computational
workload can be distributed across it, improving usage of
individual servers within the grid.
The study found that 17% of Oracle users said they mainly used
the 10g database server, and 49% mainly used the current 9i
Enterprise edition. The proportion of users largely based on pre-9i
versions of the Oracle database had dropped from 44% of users in
2004 to 20% of users in 2005.
Ronan Miles, chairman of the UK Oracle User Group, said, "A
significant number of customers have moved onto 10g - more than I
would have expected given the newness of the technology."
Miles said he was convinced that grid technology was coming of
age. A recent special interest group meeting conducted by the UK
Oracle User Group found users were deploying four- and five-node
database grids.
There are still few details on Oracle's Fusion strategy. The
user group said the project represented a huge undertaking.
Markit uses Oracle application server
Markit Group, a company that provides research services for the
financial community, is to consolidate all of its applications on a
single architecture based on the Oracle application server
middleware.
Mike Bedford, chief technology officer at Markit, said, "We will
have one single system through which all our applications can be
provisioned."
Bedford selected the Oracle application server due to the
debugging capability it offered, which allows administrators to
identify specific lines of source code or a database query that may
be causing degradation in performance.
The firm has already deployed an Oracle 10g database server in
March 2005, which runs on Red Hat Linux using a two-node four-way
HP Xeon server cluster and HP EVA5000 storage area network.