Oracle has added new features to its blockchain platform to help users speed up the development, integration, and deployment of new applications.
According to the company, while blockchain can streamline many existing processes surrounding supply chain, identity, cross-border payments, and fraud detection, businesses are struggling to implement blockchain networks within their existing ecosystems. Oracle says its blockchain platform addresses this challenge by streamlining the process of building and integrating blockchain applications across diverse business networks and connecting them into the relevant business processes within these ecosystems.
"Oracle's continued leadership and investment in enterprise blockchain technology ensures that the platform has all of the critical capabilities organizations need to build blockchain applications to handle their most important business transactions," said Frank Xiong, group vice president, blockchain product development, Oracle. "The number of customers already running blockchain applications based on Oracle's blockchain platform is testament to the strength of the technology and the value it brings to a broad range of industries."
With this latest release, Oracle has added developer-oriented productivity enhancements and consortium-oriented identity management features, which, it says, are critical to diverse organizations conducting business transactions via a blockchain network. New DevOps capabilities make the platform easier to integrate with existing business and IT systems. Additionally, as blockchain becomes an important data store in the enterprise, the platform enables Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse customers to transparently capture blockchain transaction history and current state data for analytics and to integrate it with other data sources.
New features include:
- Enhanced world state database to support standard SQL-based ledger queries reducing the complexity of developing chaincode using readily available programming skills, ensure smart contracts can safely rely on the query results, which are verified at transaction commit, and significantly boost performance of rich data queries.
- Rich history database shadows transaction history into a relational database schema in the Autonomous Data Warehouse or other Oracle databases, which transparently enables analytics integration for interactive dashboards and reports.
- Enhanced REST APIs for event subscription, blockchain administration/configuration, and monitoring of network health, transaction rates, and other statistics, which simplify integration with existing enterprise IT tools.
- Identity federation further extends authentication capabilities to work with external identity providers to facilitate consortium blockchains with many diverse participants using their existing identity management systems.
- Third-party certificate support for registering client organizations on the blockchain network to enable them to use existing certificates issued by trusted third parties.
- Hyperledger Fabric 1.3 support, which adds many new features based on the evolving open source version, including chaincode development in Java, further leveraging existing enterprise skills, and support for private transactions among a subset of members, preserving privacy and business confidentiality. This demonstrates Oracle's commitment to stay current with the Hyperledger community by leveraging new releases and contributing to the open source community.
Oracle's blockchain applications are built with Oracle Blockchain Platform and connect with Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud, Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud and other Oracle Cloud Applications.