Oracle Coherence, the latest version of Oracle's distributed in-memory data grid product, became available yesterday. Oracle Coherence 3.6 is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, and, along with Oracle WebLogic Server as well, is a critical component of application grid and private cloud deployments.
The first major release of Coherence in over a year, the updated version provides almost 850 improvements, Cameron Purdy, vice president of development, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Oracle Coherence 3.6 provides organizations with higher degrees of data reliability, accelerates design time and features additional security extensions.
"Our focus is on scalability, it is on availability, and it is on information reliability," says Purdy. "This is used by stock exchanges, most of the major banks in the world, most of the big e-commerce systems."
The new release provides better website performance for .NET applications with Coherence Web for Microsoft .NET Framework-based applications to bring the high-availability, scalability and high-performance session management to .NET. "This is a long-awaited capability for a number of our customers that are deployed on .NET for their e-commerce systems," notes Purdy.
Coherence 3.6 also provides flexible integration with distributed transactional environments through use of Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) with full XA support to allow exact reporting against live transactional data.
"We have also added a lot of security capabilities, including end to end SSL [Secure Sockets Layer] support," explains Purdy, to ensure data privacy in a distributed environment. In addition, the enhanced security provided in 3.6 gives users their own customized views of information based on their security credentials.
Coherence 3.6 also provides improved developer productivity and operational efficiency by providing a SQL-like syntax for both development as well as operational access and control of large scale, continuously available production environments. For example, Purdy notes, if an administrator of the system rolls out a new version of the application and wants to log in and see what does the data looks like, they can do so. "This can be used programmatically by the application but we also provide command line tools so you can go in and use select, insert, delete - all the SQL-like capabilities - to examine the information on the running system - and if necessary correct that. It is another very nice capability particularly for systems that are running and can't be taken down to see if something is wrong." For more details about new features in Oracle Coherence, go here.