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Feature Articles

Data WarehouseArchitectures Form theFramework for BusinessIntelligence

Data WarehousingThe promise and challenges for better business intelligence

Introduction

From the editors of:

Sponsored by:

intelligententerprise.com

Operational BI: TheEvolution Of BusinessIntelligence Antone Gonsalves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

A Closer Look at Oracle’s11g Database ReleaseDoug Henschen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Kimball University: EducateManagement to SustainData Warehouse/BI Success Warren Thornthwaite . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

informationweek.com

Oracle, Dell, And EMCUnveil New DataWarehouse InitiativeW. David Gardner . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Oracle’s New DatabaseInnovates And Imitates Charles Babcock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

Oracle Struts Its Stuff atOpenWorld Charles Babcock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

A Compendium of Recent Articles by CMP Editors

Playbook

Data Warehouse Architectures Form the Framework forBusiness Intelligence

Storing and analyzing terabytes of data on a daily basis used to be the realm of a feworganizations, but today’s data warehouse landscape has changed significantly. Now,even organizations of modest size find the need for data warehousing that allows efficientaccess to ever-growing amounts of data and, even more important, the ability to retrieveand analyze key data for both time-sensitive and strategic purposes.

In this collection of articles, you’ll find out how the connection between business intelli-gence and data warehousing is now closer than ever. In the Intelligent Enterprise article“Operational BI: The Evolution of Business Intelligence”, for instance, writer AntoneGonsalves reports how at least one market watcher (The Data Warehousing Institute)believes that BI is now at the “turning point” of unifying analytics and operationalprocesses. Leading the way in making that possible are improvements in the technologyof data warehouse platforms, and specifically improvements in scalability and data delivery.

Another selection from Intelligent Enterprise reminds readers that the scope of data warehousing and its true usefulness comes from integrated management and feedbackfrom those who use it (see “Kimball University: Educate Management to Sustain DataWarehouse/BI Success”). It's interesting to note that author Warren Thornthwaite uses theabbreviation “DW/BI system" (data warehouse/business intelligence) in his discussion ofmanaging a successful organization that's making the best use of these technologies.

Also in these pages, you’ll find recent articles that demonstrate how one of the leadingvendors in the data warehouse market has been able to innovate and expand its platformto new levels that make it more useful to business intelligence purposes than ever before.In the InformationWeek article “A Closer Look at Oracle’s 11g Database Release” and in“Oracles New Database Innovates and Imitates” you'll learn that there is much that isfamiliar, but also much that is truly improved, including accelerated change manage-ment, higher scalability, easier administration, and reduced cost.

What these and other articles here show is that never before has the promise of BusinessIntelligence been both achievable and more broadly available, due in no small part toadvances and continued innovation in data warehouse architectures.

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From theeditors of:

August 3, 2007

By Antone Gonsalves

The concept of business intelligence is changing.Once the tools of only tech-savvy business ana-lysts, BI is slowly evolving into a technology thatmerges analytics and operational processes intoa unified whole.

But the road toward operational BI is sure topresent a number of business and technicalchallenges, many of which are outlined in a whitepaper released this week by The DataWarehousing Institute.

TDWI believes operational BI is the “turningpoint” in the evolution of business intelligence,and defines it as the ability to deliver informationand insights to a broad range of users withinhours or minutes for the purpose of managing oroptimizing operational or time-sensitive businessprocesses.

That’s a long ways from most BI deploymentstoday. The majority of users continue to be busi-ness analysts and executives using sophisticatedtools to improve the effectiveness of strategic ortactical decisions by analyzing trends and pat-terns in large volumes of historical data.

While BI will certainly continue to be used in thatway, the full value of the technology won’t berealized until it merges analytics and operationalprocesses. But delivering BI to everyone fromthe shipping clerk to the chief executive has itschallenges.

TDWI believes operational BI requires a rebuild-ing of current BI systems, so queries can bereturned in seconds, not minutes or hours;reports can be updated dynamically, and thesystem can capture large amounts of data innear real-time without interfering with the opera-tions of other software. In addition, as BIbecomes more critical to operations, betterbackup and recovery systems need to be inplace to prevent long periods of downtime during server outages.

Faced with such a large undertaking, it’s no surprise that a lot of organizations are movingslowly toward operational BI. A TDWI survey of423 corporate IT professionals, the majority ofwhom were mid-level managers in the U.S.,found only a small percentage that claimed tohave systems that were “fully” or “fairly” mature.

Operational BI: The Evolution OfBusiness Intelligence

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www.intelligententerprise.com, August 3, 2007

A white paper released this week by The Data Warehousing Institute shows organizationsslowly moving toward operational business intelligence. But the journey is sure to present

a number business and technical challenges.

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“While a majority of organizations have imple-mented some form of operational BI, few havemature or sophisticated systems,” TDWI said.

Indeed, the departments leading the way insome form of operational BI deployment are thesame ones using more traditional BI tools. Thosedepartments include finance, sales, service, andmarketing.

For businesses taking BI to a new level, thebiggest challenge, according to the TDWI survey,is architecting the system, followed by managingexpectations of users, query performance,obtaining funding and working around technol-ogy limitations.

To reduce the number of problems, TDWIadvises organizations to first define the require-ments of the system to avoid building what’s notneeded. If users only need information that’s

updated twice a day, then there’s no need tospend a lot more money for updates everyminute.

In addition, if just-in-time data is needed, thenorganizations should rethink business processesto take full advantage of the capability. Otherpieces of advice include setting reasonableexpectations, so business users aren’t surprisedby results; and training users so they can reap allthe benefits of faster data access.

On the technical side, organizations must decidewhether to use a data warehouse, and select theright technology from three categories: dataacquisition, data storage and data delivery. Inaddition, systems should be scalable, so theycan later handle more users, connect to moredata sources, and handle higher volumes of datawith increased rates of throughput.

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July 16, 2007

By Doug Henschen

“It’s a big deal for Oracle and for the IT industry.”That’s how Oracle President, Charles Phillips,described last week’s launch of Oracle 11g, thefirm’s first major database release in four years.It was no overstatement, as Oracle’s market-leading database serves at the heart of tens ofthousands of data warehouses and the locus ofinformation management for more than two hun-dred thousand customers.

Oracle 11g Launch ImagesUnderscoring his firm’s data-base dominance, Phillipscited Gartner figures that putOracle’s market share at47.1 percent, “more thanIBM and Microsoft com-bined,” he asserted. ButPhillip’s higher calling was to

dispel the idea that database management sys-tems have been commoditized in a mature mar-ket, so he and fellow Oracle executives focusedon a bevy of new features and functions, high-lighting benefits including improved perform-ance, accelerated change management,increased scalability, easier administration andreduced cost.

The short list of upgradesincludes:

• An enhanced data mirror-ing feature designed toboost performance andenable “rolling” upgradeswithout taking the databasedown,

A Closer Look at Oracle’s 11gDatabase Release

Last week’s announcement of Oracle’s soon-to-be released 11g database highlighteda bevy of new features and options promising improved performance, acceleratedchange management, higher scalability, easier administration and reduced cost. Themarket leader is pioneering on some fronts and following on others, but the one thingthat’s clear is that the still-fast-growing database market is far from commoditized.Here’s a closer look at the stand-out enhancements.

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www.intelligententerprise.com, July 16, 2007

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• A Real Application Testing feature said to dra-matically shorten test and deployment cycles,

• A Total Recall capability designed to meetcompliance and audit demands,

• Partitioning and materialized view enhance-ments aimed at data warehouse deployments,

• A Fast Files capability said to efficiently man-age documents, images, e-mail and otherunstructured data within the database.

For DBAs and CIOs

Oracle’s Data Guard data mirroring feature,which exists in the current 10g database, main-tains a hot standby server that takes over if theproduction server fails. It’s an important reliabilityand availability feature available in most data-bases, yet some customers find it hard to justifythe cost of licensing a separate server that’s typ-ically idle. Data Guard upgrades in 11g changethese economics by letting you shift productionreporting and I/O-intensive backup activities tothe standby server.

“Now Data Guard is not just a protection againstdisaster, it’s an assurance of performancebecause it offloads resource-intensive workloadsfrom the production system,” explained AndyMendelsohn, senior vice president of the OracleDatabase Group.

The Data Guard upgrade also supports onlineupgrades and patches without taking a databaseout of service, and that includes the upgrade tothe latest release. “You can upgrade to 11g onthe standby database while you’re still runningproduction on 10g R2,” said Mendelsohn. “Onceyou’re sure the upgrade has gone well, you canswitch users over to 11g on the standby serverand then upgrade the production server withoutexperiencing downtime.”

The Real Application Testing feature introducedin 11g lets you capture and replay a live copy of

your production database for testing purposes,yet it doesn’t create new overhead on the data-base. By Oracle’s estimates, this Tivo-like featurecould reduce the time required to test new appli-cations, changed applications or databaseupgrades by as much as 80 percent because iteliminates the need to recreate a productionworkload in a test suite.

The new Data Guard and Real ApplicationTesting capabilities are unique to Oracle, accord-ing to Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg, but thebreakthrough he describes as most significant isTotal Recall, which “can eliminate the hassle ofarchiving.” The feature is designed to let you goback in time and perform queries as of a certaindate.

“Instead of saving the actual data, Total Recallkeeps the logs of changes to the data back asfar as you want to go,” Feinberg said. “If yourauditors come in and want to see data fromJanuary 1, 2007, you can do a query and specifythat date in the SQL statement. It’s also selec-table by table, so you don’t have to query theentire database.”

Another feature that’s unique in the databasemarket is Oracle’s Data Vault, which was previ-ously a separate product but is now being rolledinto 11g (though its not clear whether it will bean option or a standard feature). The Data Vaultseparates administrative control of the databasefrom access to the data, an advance aimed atcompliance and security concerns.

“Architects and administrators have all-accessprivileges, so they can copy and modify informa-tion and, if they’re smart, they can cover theirown tracks,” said Ari Kaplan, president of theInternational Oracle User Group. “For the firsttime in any database, the Vaulting capability sep-arates administrative control over the informa-tion, so I think a lot of companies will make itmandatory to upgrade to 11g.”

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For the Data Warehousing Gurus

Upgrades aimed at the BI and data warehousingcommunities include advanced partitioning andaccelerated query processing. OraclePartitioning — an existing, optional scalabilityand manageability feature for high-volume envi-ronments — has been enhanced with rules-based automated partitioning, and it extendsexisting range, hash and list partitioning toinclude interval, reference and virtual columnpartitioning. Also added are composite partition-ing options supporting rules-driven storage man-agement.

To speed query performance and support large-scale, high-volume deployments, Oracle hasembedded an OLAP engine in 11g to store andefficiently manage up to millions of materializedviews. Used by some 60 percent of Oracle’s datawarehousing customers, materialized views are asort of pre-fetching technique used to speedmultidimensional queries.

“The big breakthrough here is that we’re able touse the OLAP cubes as a transparent perform-ance accelerator inside the [relational] database,”said Mendelsohn. “The users are still happilyusing their SQL applications, and they won’teven know they’re using OLAP.” The cubes arerefreshed as the data changes in underlying SQLtables.

Playing Catch Up

Not all the new features in 11g are break-throughs. For example, the added support forbinary XML follows in the footsteps of IBM,Microsoft and Sybase, and the new data com-pression features are also matched by competi-tors. Oracle itself has long supported storage oflarge unstructured data objects such as imagesand documents, but the Fast Files feature intro-duced in 11g is said to match or beat file systemretrieval speeds. That may hasten changes in

content management architectures.

“Many large enterprises would not make expen-sive file servers and proprietary repositories (longthe backbone of document management andenterprise content management systems) theirfirst choice for managing ECM-related files,noted analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch.“Surely IBM and Microsoft will respond with theirown capabilities.”

The one thing Oracle failed to do last week wasprovide a lot of detail on release dates, pricingand standard-versus-optional features — otherthan to say that the first release would be aLinux version set for August. During a news con-ference, Phillips said pricing would follow thesame model used on 10g, but he acknowledgedsome new features might be optional. If thecompany follows past practice, the Unix andWindows versions of the database will bowwithin 90 days of the Linux release.

Competitors Sybase, IBM and Microsoft willbring enhancements of their own to the marketover the next six months. Sybase is expected toannounce new capabilities at its AugustTechWave user conference in Las Vegas. IBMreleased a beta version of its DB2 Viper data-base earlier this month with enhancementsincluding automated fail over, greater flexibilityand granularity in security, auditing and accesscontrol (an answer to Data Vault?) and simplifiedmemory management. Microsoft will announceSQL Server 2008 as early as February withrelease set for the second quarter.Enhancements will include better support forspatial data, something also introduced in 11g.

So it seems the database market is more like acompetitive hot bed than a "mature and com-moditized“ realm, and with growth rates averag-ing 14.2 percent, it’s actually outpacing the "hot“BI market.

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August 27, 2007

By Warren Thornthwaite

Most large organizations have fairly mature datawarehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) systemsin place, and many of these have met with somemeasure of success. Unfortunately, in this "whathave you done for me lately“ world, success isnot a single event you can gloat about as you kickback with your feet on the desk. Continued suc-cess is a constant process of building and main-taining a solid understanding of the value andpurpose of the DW/BI system across the organi-zation. We call this education, but many of thetechniques involve marketing and organizationalstrategies. Call it what you will, you must activelyand constantly promote the DW/BI system.

First, you need to know who your stakeholdersare and make sure you have standard communi-cations tools in place, like status notes, newslet-ters and quantitative usage reports. There are alsoa few qualitative and organizational tools you canuse to educate management about the value andpurpose of the DW/BI system.

Gathering Evidence

While usage statistics are interesting, they showonly activity, not business value. Simple querycounts tell you nothing about the content or busi-ness impact of those queries. Unfortunately,there’s no automated way of capturing the valueof each analysis from the DW/BI system. You stillhave to get this information the old-fashionedway, by talking to people. Someone on the DW/BIsystem team has to go out into the user commu-nity on a regular basis and ask people to describewhat they are doing, assess the business impactit has had and document it.

Most of the time, the impact of any given analysisisn’t all that stunning. People do useful things thatmake a big difference in their work, but it’s not amulti-million dollar hit. Every so often, you will findan analysis or operational-BI application that hashad a significant impact. The analyst may haveidentified a pattern of calls in the customer caredata that led to a simple change in the documen-

Kimball University: EducateManagement to Sustain Data

Warehouse/BI Success

Data warehousing and business intelligence success cannot be taken for granted.You must create an ongoing education and communication program to maintain your

success and extend it across the organization.

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tation and reduced the call volume by 13 percent(at $6 per call, that’s over $140,000 per year for acompany that takes 500 calls per day). Or theymay have analyzed the donor database in a smallnon-profit organization and identified donors whohad dropped out. This led to a special program toreconnect with these people that yielded a 63-percent response rate and close to $200,000. The operational-BI application may offer ring tonerecommendations on a Website based on cus-tomer purchase history. Each ring tone may fetchonly a $1, but a 30-percent increase in ring tonedownloads could add up to real money. You getthe idea.

Educating the Business: The User Forum

Finding high-impact examples requires a bit ofwork. One effective technique Kimball Group hasused to identify and leverage qualitative examplesof value is called a user forum. The user forum isa DW/BI event designed for the business commu-nity. Your main business sponsor should kick offthis 90-minute meeting with a short speech abouthow important the DW/BI system is to the organi-zation’s success. The first agenda item is a briefpresentation from the team about the recentaccomplishments, current state and short-termplans of the DW/BI system. The bulk of the meet-ing is dedicated to two presentations from busi-ness analysts who used the BI system to generatesignificant value for the organization. They talkabout what they did, how they did it, and whatkind of impact it had.

Senior managers like these events because theysee the impact. Often the head of one departmentwill see what another department has done andrealize his group is missing an opportunity. Middlemanagement and analysts like the presentationsbecause they include enough detail so people cansee exactly how the analysis was accomplished.They learn new techniques and approaches to theanalytical process. The three examples of busi-ness value described abouve would be great fea-ture presentations at a user forum.

A good meeting doesn’t happen by accident.Carefully plan the meeting over six months. Find

good presentation candidates with high businessvalue by canvassing users on a regular basis.Once you find a good example, work with theuser to create a clear, compelling presentationwith lots of good screen captures and a summarypage that shows the dollar impact of the analysis.Rehearse the presentation with them, especially ifthey are not experienced presenters. This helpsyou, and them, get the timing down so your audi-ence doesn’t miss the punch line because themeeting went too long. Email a reminder a day ortwo ahead of time, and call everyone you’d like tobe there to make sure they are going to make it tothe meeting. If key folks, like the CEO or VP ofMarketing, can’t make it, consider reschedulingrather than have them miss out. If they are alreadyon your side, it’s good to have the show of sup-port (see related article, "Habits of EffectiveSponsors“); if they are not converts yet, theycould learn something by being at the meeting.

Schedule User Forum meetings on a regularbasis: about every six months or so. Don’t be tooproud to employ blatant marketing techniques topromote the meeting. The basics almost go with-out saying: food and drink are a must. (We foundtrays of fresh donuts to be a big hit.) Consideroffering marketing swag as prizes. Since most BIteams are friendly with the marketing group, see ifthey’ll let you raid their goodies closet.

It’s a great idea to keep the presentations on file. After a year or two, you will have a libraryof powerful business-value examples. Put a link tothem on your BI portal. Print them out and make awelcome packet you can present to every newexecutive.

Educating Senior Staff

Your top educational priority in the long termshould be to continuously and consistently informsenior management about what the DW/BI sys-tem is, why it’s important, how it should be usedand what it takes to make it happen (see relatedarticle on "Data Warehouse Check Ups“). Theuser forum helps achieve this objective, but thegreater your access to senior management, theeasier this education process will be.

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Ideally, the head of the DW/BI system is part ofsenior staff and participates in their planningmeetings. If not, try to get a regular slot on theirmeeting schedule to present success stories andplans and to hear about potential changes in busi-ness priorities.

Often, senior management will want to explore anidea to see if it’s viable before launching anymajor new initiatives. Having a direct line to theDW/BI team can help senior management quicklytriage ideas that should be abandoned and thosethat should be developed further. Once an ideabegins to gain traction, the DW/BI team shouldmake sure its development is accompanied byappropriate measurement and analytical systems.All too often, we’ve seen new initiatives taken onby senior management with no means to measureimpact or value. If the data is not collected, youcan’t analyze it.

Bottom line: however you make it happen, youneed to make sure someone on the BI team isinvolved with senior management and under-stands where the business is headed so you canbe prepared to support it.

Working with Steering Committees

If it’s not politically possible for the BI team leadto be part of senior staff, another way to get theinformation you need is to establish an ongoingsteering committee for the DW/BI system madeup of senior-level business representatives (see. Ifyou don’t have a steering committee, try to recruitpeople who you know will be able to worktogether, give you the information you need and

wield some influence in the organization. Youmight call this group the Business IntelligenceDirectorate (BID), or some other important-sound-ing name with a nice acronym. It may seem trivial,but naming is a big part of the marketing process.

You may also have a different kind of business-user steering committee made up of analysts andpower users who help prioritize lower-level tasksand identify technical opportunities for the BI sys-tem. You might call this the BI Technical Experts(BITE) group.

Conclusion

You may feel like since you’ve done a good job,you shouldn’t have to continually market theDW/BI system, or educate the business commu-nity. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. You needto continually gather concrete evidence of yoursuccess and use that to educate senior manage-ment. You also need to be informed of and havesome influence over the decision-making processat the senior staff level, either through direct participation or via a steering committee. Thismay sound like a burden, but one positive result isthat as senior management understands the business value of the DW/BI system, they nolonger question your budget.

Warren Thornthwaite is a member of the KimballGroup, a Kimball University instructor and iscoauthor of The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit(Wiley, 2006) and The Data Warehouse LifecycleToolkit (Wiley, 1998). Write to him at [email protected].

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September 27, 2007

By W. David Gardner

Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) announced its OracleOptimized Warehouse initiative Thursday, a com-bination hardware and software products aimedat improving performance of data warehouseenvironments built on the Oracle Database withpreconfigured hardware and storage productsfrom Dell and EMC.

In Oracle Optimized Warehouse, Dell PowerEdgeservers and EMC (NYSE: EMC) Clariion net-worked storage systems have been validatedand tested for optimal performance with OracleDatabase, the companies said. Oracle noted thatthe product contains preinstalled data ware-house and business intelligence capabilities ofOracle Database.

“With the Oracle Optimized Warehouse Initiative,customers no longer need to choose betweenproprietary data warehouse solutions andOracle-based solutions custom-built on leadinghardware platforms,” said Ray Roccaforte,Oracle’s VP of data warehousing and businessintelligence platform, in a statement. The newofferings enable customers to utilize the prebuiltdatabase product out of the box.

Oracle said the Oracle Optimized Warehouse,which is now available from Dell, is supported asa single product, even though it consists of anintegrated prebuilt database, storage, and serversystem.

Rick Becker, VP of solutions for Dell (Dell)’sproduct group, said Dell anticipates building onits relationship with Oracle and EMC to help cus-tomers scale Oracle Optimized Warehouse appli-cations as needed. EMC has been supplyinghardware to Dell for several months.

“The long-standing collaboration among EMC,Dell, and Oracle enables us to help customerssimplify the implementation of a well-designeddata warehouse and easily expand it to meettheir business needs,” said Mike O’Neill, EMC’sVP of technology alliances, in a statement.

Oracle indicated its Oracle Optimized Warehouseis targeted at data marts, enterprise data warehouses, and BI applications. Oracle said itoffers reference configurations for customerswho prefer the flexibility of configuring their owndata warehouse platforms rather than prebuiltconfigurations.

Oracle, Dell, And EMC Unveil NewData Warehouse Initiative

The Oracle Optimized Warehouse combines the Oracle Database with preconfiguredhardware from Dell and EMC, with the goal of giving customers an out-of-the-box

data warehouse.

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informationweek.com, September 27, 2007

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July 14, 2007

By Charles Babcock

Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) went to New York lastweek to introduce the first new version of itsflagship database in four years: Oracle 11g. Andto remind people of its database expertise.“Innovation is the theme of 11g,” said RobertShimp, VP of Oracle’s global technology busi-ness unit.

Be that as it may, there were still plenty of ques-tions. Some of the database’s 500 new featureswill be offered as separately priced add-onswhen 11g becomes available on Linux in August,but an Oracle spokesmancouldn’t say specifically whichones. He also couldn’t saywhen versions of 11g will beavailable for Unix and Windows.

Oracle president Charles Phillipsboasted that 35% of the 20,000members of the InternationalOracle Users Group "say they’reready to go to 11g,“ though hedeclined to speculate on howlong it might take before theentire customer base hadmigrated to the new system.

Aspects of the new database are intriguing. In11g, for example, Oracle is pioneering a featurethat lets the database take a snapshot of an 11gworkload, then run it on a test version of a newdatabase server, which might include a databaseupgrade, a new operating system, or a new mid-dleware-hardware combination. “It’s like recordand replay,” says Andy Mendelsohn, an Oraclesenior VP. "You can replay the workload in a newenvironment and see if it will run or spot the bot-tlenecks.“

This real application testing feature—or regres-sion testing, as it’s commonlycalled—aims to ensure thateverything works as expected.Real application testing isexpected to reduce one of thedatabase administrator’s biggestheadaches: moving from an oldsystem configuration to a newone.

Another key feature is more effi-cient XML handling. VerboseXML text, often used in messag-ing over the Internet, gets trans-lated into binary format and

Oracle’s New Database Innovates And Imitates

There are some neat new features in Oracle 11g — and some intended to stave off Microsoft.

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Users say they’re raringto go, Phillips asserts.

stored in the database. Oracle 11g can com-press binary XML to save storage space; it canalso encrypt it to ensure privacy.

In another innovation, Oracle has built more use-fulness into live standby systems earmarked fordisaster recovery. Instead of keeping the hotstandby on idle, Oracle 11g can offload reportingand other noncritical functions to the disasterrecovery system, without impairing the data-base’s ability to be up to date and available at aninstant’s notice.

Some of the additions to Oracle 11g are aimedat countering Microsoft, which has been addingbusiness intelligence features into the core of itsdatabase system rather than selling them asadd-on products. Oracle has favored the latterstrategy, but it has reversed course with 11g byembedding online analytical processing cubes.Average users, as opposed to highly trainedbusiness analysts, can fire standard SQL queriesat OLAP cubes and get the benefit of in-depth

views of data, such as a time-sensitive look atsales data across multiple regions.

FOR MATURE AUDIENCESContrary to some analyst predictions, the“mature” database market continues to grow ata rapid clip—14.3% in 2006, to $16.5 billion,according IDC’s latest figures. IBM, Microsoft,and Oracle all share in that growth; Oracle isgrowing the fastest measured by dollar volume,while Microsoft is growing the fastest by unitsshipped. Together, they both appear to be con-tributing to IBM’s slippage in overall marketshare.

One reason that Oracle is moving ahead as IBM is slipping, says IDC analyst CarlOlofson, is its reoriented appeal to small andmidsize businesses through a smaller-footprint"express“ version of the database and its gain inlicense revenue with customers’ upgrades tomulticore servers, which increase the price ofdatabase licenses.

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informationweek.com, October 20, 2007

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November 17, 2007

By Charles Babcock

John Marks, IT supervisor at ChesapeakeEnergy, finds his data growing at a rate of 75% ayear. Particularly troublesome are digital imagesof terrain and drilling locations that must bescanned into Chesapeake’s system. The imageindex is on one server, the images on another. Ifthe index is down, no images can be retrieved.

By upgrading to Oracle 11g next year, Marks willbe able to layer the index file system on Oracle11g’s Automatic Storage Management enhancedfile management system and put both in thesame database. That’s insurance they will beavailable when needed, he says.

At a time when Oracle appearsto be obsessed with applica-tions, Chesapeake Energy is anexample of why Oracle keepsgetting stronger in its core data-base and middleware busi-nesses. Oracle isn’t addingwilly-nilly to its application port-folio, although 41 acquisitions in45 months might leave thatimpression. It’s striving to staycompetitive with Microsoft andIBM on the database front,

surpass SAP in applications, and match BEASystems and IBM in middleware.

Can any vendor sustain such a juggling act?CEO Larry Ellison claims Oracle will be the first,and he’s tossing a few more balls into the air.During last week’s Oracle OpenWorld conferencein San Francisco, Oracle announced it was mov-ing into virtualization with a virtual machinehypervisor based on Xen. Virtualize your data-base servers with Oracle VM, suggested presi-dent Charles Phillips.

“Oracle VM is an enabler of gridcomputing, and we’ll never goback to big iron,” Ellison said inhis keynote address. Oracle’s11g database upgrade wasreleased in July, but with 43,000customers in town, companyofficials couldn’t resist showingoff some of its new features.One of them, Partition Advisor,lets database administratorspartition an extra-large databaseinto more manageable chunks.New compression features letadministrators shrink data down.

Oracle Struts Its Stuff atOpenWorld

Virtualization, better application integration and new core database features wow the faithful.

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Ellison uses Jedi mindtrick on 43,000 faithful

Photo by Kim Kulish

“The database triples every two years, and ITmust buy the storage, add the power, expandthe server querying capability,” said Oracle senior VP Andy Mendelsohn, describing thechallenge faced by many customers. Using 11g’snew compression capabilities and offloadingless-frequently-used data to low-cost storage, amillion-dollar storage expense can be shrunk tojust over $58,000, he claimed. Tiered storage isback in vogue.

Oracle’s primary growth area remains enterpriseapplications. Oracle introduced three integrationpacks for the telecom industry to help automatecustomer order-to-billing and revenue account-ing and to get customer information to servicerepresentatives. The packs consist mainly ofsoftware modules built on Oracle’s Fusion middleware.

KEEP THOSE CUSTOMERSOracle knows it has to offer a compelling reasonfor customers coming from JD Edwards,

PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and other acquisi-tions to move to a new generation of Oracleapplications. One way it’s trying to do that is byembedding “SOA-enabled endpoints” in Fusionapps, giving customers different ways to buildbusiness processes and extract data.

Ellison boasted that 1,500 customers havesigned up for Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux techni-cal support. Oracle is encouraging customers todeploy its database on Linux as an alternative toits main low-cost competitor, Microsoft’s SQLServer.

To Michael Prince, CTO at Burlington CoatFactory, Oracle on Linux is a good idea. “We runall the Oracle we can under Linux," he says.When it comes to Linux technical support, how-ever, he turns to IBM.

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15 ORACLE PLAYBOOK

informationweek.com, November 17, 2007

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