Nick Langley
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk
What is it?
Not for the first time,
Oracle has created
poor publicity for a new release of its market-leading database, by
aggressively over-egging its forecasts of take-up. Earlier this
year, Pythian group, which
manages databases remotely for Oracle customers, reported that only
three of more than 700 production databases it looks after had
moved to Oracle's latest version, 11g. But that's not unexpected
for a product that was only released last year.
A better guide may be the 35% of
International Oracle User Group
members who told their organisation they intended to make the move
within the next year - although the worsening financial climate may
reduce this. The previous version, Oracle 10g, is likely to hold
sway for a few years yet.
Oracle certification is the most expensive to achieve of the
three leading mid-market databases -
IBM's DB2
being cheapest. But Oracle skills carry a salary premium, while
Microsoft's SQL Server is the lowest paid of the three.
Where did it originate?
Oracle was released in 1979 by Larry Ellison's Relational
Software Inc. It didn't support transactions, but Ellison was able
to claim he'd beaten IBM into the market with an
SQL database.
This was the earliest of a series of much-hyped "firsts" for the
company, which changed its name to Oracle Corporation in 1982.
Oracle 10g, the currently dominant version, began shipping in
2004.
What is it for?
Oracle developers have a choice of
PL/SQL, Oracle's
SQL implementation, using
Oracle Reports or
Oracle Forms or Java,
using
Oracle JDeveloper. There's also the GUI-based Oracle SQL
Developer, part of Oracle's drive to simplify development and open
it up to non-professionals. Java is the fastest growing development
environment, but Oracle has pledged to support Forms and Reports
through to 2013.
The most widely used version is the Enterprise Edition, but
there's also a Standard Edition for between one and four CPUs, a
Personal Edition with all the functionality of the Enterprise
Edition, and the free, downloadable Express Edition, which comes
with many constraints - one database per machine, one CPU, 4GB data
maximum.
What makes it special?
Oracle has made much of the "green" credentials of 11g -which
actually translates into lower data centre costs, such as a
three-fold reduction in disc space using compression. 11g also
makes use of the standby database - which normally waits in reserve
in case of a system crash - to take on workloads such as reporting,
backup, testing, and rolling upgrades of production databases.
How difficult is it to master?
It's not cheap, and fairly time consuming, if you take the
classroom route: five days to learn PL/SQL for example - and that
follows a five-day course introducing you to SQL on 10g. Java
developers with J2EE application server experience can be
productive more quickly.
Where is it used?
Oracle has the broadest customer base of all database vendors,
though it runs up against niche competitors such as
Sybase in investment banking
and mobile databases, and
Teradata in high-end data
warehousing.
What systems does it run on?
Oracle has focused on Linux in recent years, and so far 11g is
available only on Linux and Windows. 10g is also supplied for IBM's
zSeries and several flavours of Unix, including IBM's AIX, HP UX
and Sun Solaris.