Article Title: Oracle ups the 9i volume
Source: the451
Date: 19 Apr 2001
by: the451, special to searchDatabase
Oracle 9i, the next version of Oracle's flagship database, will ship later
this quarter -- probably in May -- launching with a big splash at the
company's headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif.
The company announced 9i at the start of October 2000 and has being trying
to control the flow of information about the product since then. It has
managed to do so quite successfully.
The latest element built into 9i that Oracle is talking about is what it
calls "advanced analytic services," by which it means OLAP, ETL (extraction,
transformation and loading) and data mining capabilities. It had earlier
spoken about the content management features, such as built-in
personalization, and released its Data Guard database backup product last
month.
Oracle is well aware of the need to strike a balance between offering a
platform on which its ISV partners can sell products while also providing a
more complete product suite itself. And even though the company is being
more aggressive than ever in encroaching on the territory of its partners,
Jeremy Burton, Oracle's senior vice president of product and services
marketing, insists there is still room for the major tools vendors, such as
Cognos, to build on this new release. They have been among the earliest
certified vendors, he said, claiming that certification for them is
relatively simple. If they already support symmetric multiprocessing, then
Oracle's Real Application Clusters will present no major problems for them.
As the451 has explained before, the clustering is the main technical
development in 9i compared with its predecessors. The technology supplants
Oracle Parallel Server, which has been part of the database for a long time.
But Burton says its "barrier to entry" was too high, in that developers had
to write their databases to suit the underlying cluster and partition the
data in order to manage the competition for resources. That has been
eliminated with the Real Application Clusters, he says.
Oracle 9i is also supposed to be a database for service providers, and
Burton says it is the first to be able to run multiple customers, using
multiple applications off a single instance of the Oracle database. Oracle
8i has a virtual private database feature that enables multiple companies to
use a single database, but not multiple applications. This is obviously
important for service providers, who do not necessarily want to buy a new
license for each of their customers. The company has a fledgling ASP sales
force, but Oracle hopes hosting companies and ASPs will become a useful
channel for it to sell through, enabling it to deal directly with fewer
people but hopefully still maintain and grow sales overall.
On April 24, Larry Ellison will further develop the themes for the database
launch. He will talk about things like data center consolidation --
"eliminate complexity, don?t manage complexity," as Burton puts it -- and
about the alleged advantage of buying all the elements from one vendor.
Ellison will also go over his message -- essentially directed against the
open source movement -- about not customizing the code because doing so will
only make life worse and more expensive. "Doing more with less" is one of
Oracle's taglines.
Larger software vendors, like Oracle, usually advocate buying everything
from one company, while smaller companies advocate a best-of-breed approach.
Because Burton doesn't see IBM as a software company, he describes its
pattern as "buy everything from everybody else and we'll tie together
because we're a services company." "IBM is the antithesis of us," he says,
whereas SAP is the closest in terms of business models.
Oracle has published its first benchmark, a TPC-H decision support test,
which was run against a 3TB database on Sun Microsystems hardware and
allegedly achieved better results than an IBM DB2 database running at 1TB on
IBM hardware. Burton claims the result is even more striking given DB2's
decision support heritage. The announcement about the benchmark mentioned a
release date of June 19, but actual shipping will begin earlier than that.
Oracle has finished its channel partner training, which came to about 1,000
partners. They will in turn train thousands more, which accounts for
Oracle's earlier claims of training 3,000-5,000 channel partners. Pricing
has not been announced yet for 9i, but it will retain the "power unit"
pricing model, says Burton.
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