Release 11g of the Oracle database, now generally available, differs from earlier releases in that it contains significant advancements pushing the leading enterprise database further ahead of the competition. But is it a database anymore?

Improvements in performance, scalability and ease of administration that any major new version should have, Oracle has expanded the capabilities in information management for items such as documents, text, files and other unstructured data, including XML, and by doing so, continues to encroach on the territory of content management systems.

In reality, though, what has caught the attention of OLAP and BI insiders is that in release 11g, Oracle completes the embedding of multidimensional access and storage capabilities from the Express technology it acquired 12 years ago. It’s an interesting bit of timing - Oracle now has to decide what to do with recently acquired Hyperion Essbase, a long-time rival of Express. This adds more OLAP to the Oracle portfolio that yet needs to be formalized. Oracle appears to look to further implant this database as part of their global BI efforts and differentiate it to the database level OLAP option.

In 11g analytical improvements in data mining and management of data warehouses provides Oracle with the potential to regain some traction taken away by data warehouse appliance vendors such as Netezza, not to mention Teradata, which NCR is spinning off as an independent company and continues to grow new business and extend their customer relationships. Oracle who has longed to decrease Teradata role in the market has still yet to significantly impact their success.

Further crowding this landscape are Oracle partners HP and Sun, which recently have decided to support alternatives to Oracle on their hardware platform. HP recently released NeoView, a next-generation appliance that it hopes will provide more robust solutions in data warehousing to compete against other options including Oracle. Sun is now marketing with Greenplum, an open source data warehouse database as an alternative to Oracle. Not to be left behind, Oracle has started its own program to work with appliance hardware providers looking to provide more integrated systems that can work with their hardware partners or even other not as well known hardware providers.

Oracle overall continues to face competition from IBM, Microsoft and SAP, who also resells or promotes Oracle database licenses over the last decade to support their enterprise applications and middleware. Oracle, for its part, has a significant opportunity to place its new database with a large number of customers pulled in through its many acquisitions over the last five years. Moving beyond applications and transactions, Oracle 11g is capable of managing very large volumes of data by incorporating capabilities from Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Total Recall and Oracle Files.

Once again, Oracle continues to push the envelope of what a database is and can deliver for transactional and analytical processing, while adding utility capabilities in areas such as information search. Oracle has positioned 11g well against its traditional database competitors; beyond that, it will have to ensure its product is not seen as too complex for specific uses in data warehousing, content management and search, and analytics. The question for most organizations will be whether you are ready to utilize all of these capabilities or if you have the resources that need to be trained how to utilize it efficiently.

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Regards,

Mark Smith
CEO & EVP Research