Oracle has announced the availability of its Oracle Database 11g on the Linux platform and, at the same time, released new capabilities for its existing 11g Enterprise Edition offering.
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition and Standard Edition One are now generally available for Linux x86-based systems.
"Oracle Database 11g continues the focus on grid computing by enabling grids of low-cost servers and storage to deliver fast, scalable and reliable data processing," said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies at Oracle.
With 11g support for Linux, the building of such grids should be cheaper for organisations using Linux-based hardware and applications.
The worldwide relational database management systems (RDBMS) market totalled £8bn (AU$19.5bn) in 2006, a 14.2% increase on 2005, according to analyst group Gartner.
The overall RDBMS market continues to be dominated by the three largest suppliers — Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft — accounting for 85.6% of worldwide revenues last year.
While Linux as an RDBMS operating system was still well behind Unix and Windows, with a 15.5% market share, it continued to dominate in terms of OS growth, with a two-thirds rise during 2005, according to Gartner.
Colleen Graham, a Gartner analyst, said: "Organisations are looking to gain insight into the business to make better decisions and identify new opportunities. This is forcing them to invest in their data assets, purchasing new technology and tools that increase operational efficiency, and enable better use of data-management resources."
This need for improved usage of data-management resources is what Oracle is trying to address with its new Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition platform tools. These include Oracle Real Application Testing, Oracle Advanced Compression, Oracle Total Recall and Oracle Active Data Guard.
Oracle Real Application Testing helps customers reduce the time, risk and cost of testing database and operating-system upgrades in a controlled and cost-effective manner, said Oracle.
Oracle said new compression capabilities for all types of data mean that compression ratios of 2 to 3 times or more can now be achieved using the new Oracle Advanced Compression technology. Coupled with new partitioning capabilities, Oracle Advanced Compression can also be used to deploy information lifecycle management strategies in the database without application changes, further reducing overall storage requirements.
Oracle Total Recall enables administrators to easily maintain historical archives of changed data for the purposes of compliance or business intelligence, for example.
And Oracle Active Data Guard can be used to enhance the performance of production databases by offloading resource-intensive operations such as queries and backups to a single physical standby database.
Oracle Real Application Testing costs £5,000 (AU$12,000) per processor or £100 (AU$240) per named user, as does Oracle Advanced Compression.
Oracle Total Recall costs £2,500 (AU$6,000) per processor or £50 (AU$120) per named user. Oracle Active Data Guard costs the same.
A free evaluation version of Oracle Database 11g on Linux x86 is available for download on Oracle's site.
Antony Savvas of ZDNet UK reported from London.
