Oracle9i Release 2 To Bolster Backup Capabilities, Cluster Infrastructure

Oracle9i Release 2 is expected out this spring, probably in June, and Oracle has been dribbling out details of new functionality, including better XML support, since Oracle OpenWorld last December.

"They've been touting the clustered file system for Windows, which is a big deal because one pain with RAC [Oracle's Real Application Clusters is running it on raw partitions," said Mark Shainman, senior research analyst with The Meta Group. Oracle also plans clustered file systems for Linux, to follow the launch of Release 2.

RAC has been a big push for Oracle for months. "I think RAC is the most important thing ever in our history. We can make a group of machines look like one machine, and make existing applications fault-tolerant," CEO Larry Ellison said at Oracle OpenWorld late last year.

Despite all the hype, there appear to be relatively few customers running RAC now, and anything that can help speed implementations could help migrations off Oracle8i or earlier. One problem Oracle and other software vendors face is that in this slow economy, corporations are not eager to move quickly to new software versions. "Most Global 2000 organizations have been holding off on upgrades because of the cost not only in licensing, but in people," Shainman said.

Data Guard software was built to ease the creation and maintenance of backup databases. The idea is to save data and keep it safe in case there is a system failure or disaster. The new Data Guard will let DBAs apply individual SQL statements vs. entire log files. That will allow much more "flexibility and the ability to apply database upgrades switchover or switchback," said Richard Niemec, CEO of TUSC, a Lombard, Ill., Oracle integrator and partner.

Oracle, like rivals IBM and Microsoft, is adding more native support for XML data to its core relational database. Ideally, the non-relational XML data will be as easily and reliably searched as its relational counterparts.

IBM plans more XML support within DB2 as well as a new DB2-based product, code-named Xperanto, late this year. That product will offer full-text search and support for Xquery, the proposed query language standard for XML data, IBM said.