Oracle and IBM Introduce New Databases

By Mitch Wagner

원본 : http://www.internetweek.com/story/INW20010613S0001

IT managers are getting some new choices as Oracle and IBM launch new versions of their database software, with both companies adding new functionality designed to make the servers more suitable for e-business.

Oracle plans on Thursday to ship Oracle 9i, the much-talked about latest version of the software. This version will offer new business intelligence tools, increased scalability and management tools. Until now, many of these tools were typically available only through third-party applications, said independent analyst Philip Russom.

"This is a honkin' big data center," Russom said. "It has a lot of services and functions in it that you used to get from separate point-products."

Chief among these functions is a set of Online Analytic Processing (OLAP) and data mining tools. The OLAP tools contain similar functionality to Oracle Express, a product that Oracle is no longer developing. Data mining tools take the place of third-party tools from companies like E.piphany.

Oracle 9i includes Oracle Personalization, an e-commerce tool designed to allow business managers to use the database to make personalized recommendations both for anonymous Web visitors and registered customers, Oracle said.

Oracle Real Application Clusters, another new feature, is designed to provide a cluster of Oracle servers with increased reliability and scalability. Every machine in a cluster is designed to act as a failover server for every other machine. Real Application Clusters uses a "shared cache" architecture to improve performance; where previous clustering technology used shared disk storage, the Real Application Clusters uses a shared memory cache, which is faster than disk. The performance boost is significant: a two-node cluster achieves 190% the performance of a standalone system.

Likewise, failover is significantly improved. Real Application Clusters improves the recovery time from a database failure from 10 minutes to 19 seconds, Oracle said.

IBM DB2 Version 7.2 includes new functionality to integrate the database better with other software, IBM said. The application supports the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) interface of XML, which is a standard that allows applications to register the services they provide, so that other applications can find them and link to them over the Internet. The software also supports the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), so that once the service has been located with UDDI, another application can ask for and receive that service.

The new version integrates with the MQSeries, messaging middleware from IBM used for publish-and-subscribe services, such as a stock ticker, or a newsfeed, IBM said. This integration will also allow a DB2 database to feed an MQSeries queue or, conversely, an MQSeries queue can be used to populate a DB2 database.

IBM also added functionality to allow DB2 databases to query Sybase, Microsoft and Informix databases, in addition to the previous support for querying Oracle databases, IBM said.