Oracle's development teams are backing up Larry Ellison's mantra of fewer, bigger servers, and it's up to customers now to decide if they want to put all their faith in the Oracle gospel or keep a more widely distributed, heterogeneous architecture for their most critical IT services.
The big news in this release is the new file- and Web-serving additions. Although Oracle's database engine itself has changed little from previous releases, it's still true that only IBM's DB2 can compete with Oracle8i's breadth of database functionality.
Oracle8i's biggest weakness in this area is its lack of an included OLAP (online analytical processing) server for ad hoc analysis queries, something both IBM and Microsoft now provide with their databases (Microsoft also now includes data mining).
Oracle8i started shipping in late spring and was available for Solaris, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Linux operating systems in November. Support for other platforms will follow in the next few months.
In our tests, Oracle8i's IFS (Internet File System) was the clear standout in terms of strategically valuable product changes. Having set up and used the product ourselves, we think it's a brilliant and original product idea and will make content and file management on large file systems much easier -- in a future release.
Using the product's Web interface or simply a mapped Windows drive, we were able to copy files both to and from IFS.
2%
4%
