Oracle Beefs Up 9i Support

Oracle9i Release 2 is expected this spring, 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 [Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) is running it on raw partitions," said Mark Shainman, senior research analyst at Meta Group.

Oracle also plans clustered file systems for Linux, to follow the launch of Release 2.

RAC has been a big push for months. "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," Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison said at OpenWorld.

Despite all the hype, there appear to be relatively few customers running RAC now, several solution providers and analysts said. The slow economy has also hampered moves to new versions.

"Most Global 2000 organizations have been holding off on upgrades because of the cost not only in licensing, but in people," Shainman said.

The enhanced data protection, Data Guard, eases the creation and maintenance of backup databases, the company said. The idea is to save data and keep it safe in case of system failure or disaster.

Data Guard will let DBAs apply individual SQL statements vs. entire log files, which will allow more "flexibility and the ability to apply database upgrades switchover or switchback," said Richard Niemec, CEO of TUSC, an Oracle integrator and partner in Lombard, Ill.

Oracle, like rivals IBM and Microsoft, is also 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, the company said.

For its part, IBM is planning a new DB2-based product, code-named Xperanto, late this year. It will offer full-text search and support for Xquery, the proposed query language standard for XML data, the company said.