Oracle Database 11g Release 2 became generally available and downloadable yesterday from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Improvements have been made in all key areas, with a general emphasis on helping customers lower their IT infrastructure costs. Announcing the new release during a conference call yesterday, Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle observed, "Right now the majority of our installed base customers are running on 10g R2, with a good number on 11g R1. The reason 11g R2 is important is not only for the innovations in the release but it is really the release that the masses of our installed base are going to be moving to as they go to the 11g family of databases."
Mendelsohn adds, "It is important for us to get this release out and bring out a very stable, reliable platform for our customers who are upgrading from the existing 10g release." The pattern has been that an R1 release is where Oracle does it most innovative work and the R2 release is where Oracle adds new features but is also polishing the innovations in the R1 release. With the combination of 11g R1 and R2, says Mendelsohn, Oracle is addressing some of the key business challenges of its customers.
The 11g R2 release represents the culmination of a journey Oracle began just over two years ago with Release 1 of 11g, Mark Townsend, vice president, Database Product Management, Oracle, told 5 Minute Briefing during a pre-launch interview. During those years, roughly 1,500 developers have worked on the product and there have been more than 15 million hours of testing done on the product as well.
Oracle 11g Release 2 delivers capabilities for reduced server costs by consolidating onto the Grid, reduced storage costs, improving performance for data warehouses as well as raising DBA productivity.
Among key new capabilities, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) delivers grid plug and play and new server pooling capabilities that enable organizations to reduce their server costs by streamlining the provisioning and management of consolidated database grids.
Oracle RAC One Node, a new Database option, is also available with the new release. This enables customers to run a single Database on a single node inside the grid, says Townsend. While it doesn't enable the scalability provided by having more than one node working on that database, Oracle RAC One Node is a solution that allows customers to more easily consolidate their less mission-critical database environments on the grid with the redundancy and availability provided by Oracle Real Application Clusters.
Additionally, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 advanced compression and partitioning help reduce storage costs by compressing data as much as 2x-4x and simplifying the use of storage tiers. Enhancements to Automatic Storage Management include new cluster file system capabilities that extend beyond Oracle Databases to provide general-purpose file systems, helping customers further reduce their storage management costs.
For improved performance in data warehouses, Oracle Database 11g R2 in combination with the Oracle Database Machine can deliver up to 10x faster query performance. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 also delivers enhanced query performance with the ability to transparently execute a query against data stored in memory across all the servers in a grid.
Oracle Database 11g R2 Automatic Storage Management, Oracle RAC and Active Data Guard allow storage and server resources to be used for both fault tolerance and running production workloads, keeping servers and storage from sitting idle waiting for failures. In addition, a new feature called Edition-based Redefinition has been introduced to allow customer database applications to be upgraded online. "One of the things customers have always wanted to be able to do is online application upgrades," says Townsend.
For more details about Oracle Database 11g Release 2, go here.