SCIENCE

2005 signified a year of considerable milestones and achievements for Oracle Database 10g. Major milestones in 2005, included: the general availability of Oracle Database 10g Release 2, the acquisition of real-time data management software vendor TimesTen, the introduction of a free, starter database -- Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), and the unveiling of new development tools for the Microsoft .NET Framework, PHP and Oracle Database Web applications. Beyond new products and tools, Oracle extended its overall leadership in the worldwide relational and object-relational database management systems software market, and once again powered the world's largest commercial database. Introduced in July 2005, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 delivers a more robust implementation of the Oracle Database 10g Release 1 feature set. Specifically, Release 2 offers compelling new performance, availability, security and management features, to help customers and partners achieve a higher quality of service, while helping to reduce the complexity and cost of data management. The latest release also offers significant enhancements in the deployment and management of highly available, scalable database clusters, making it more efficient and cost-effective for customers to deploy an Oracle grid infrastructure. Since the general availability of Oracle Database 10g in January 2004, over 30 percent of Oracle Database customers have adopted Oracle Database 10g -- the only database designed for grid computing. Oracle Extends Product Portfolio with TimesTen With the acquisition of real-time data management software vendor TimesTen in June 2005, Oracle uniquely offers customers a complete data management solution spanning real-time, embedded and front-office systems to large-scale enterprise databases and data warehouses. Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database enables customers to manage events, transactions and data for a growing number of performance-critical applications in telecom, networking, securities trading and other industries. Oracle also introduced Oracle TimesTen Release 6.0, which added significant enhancements in caching performance and availability, larger in- memory databases and data caches, tighter integration with other Oracle products, and broader support of industry standards. Free, Starter Database for Developers, ISVs and Students Unveiled Oracle made it easier and more affordable for application developers, database administrators (DBAs) and students to develop and deploy applications on Oracle with the introduction of Oracle Database XE, a free, starter database. The product (which experienced an unprecedented amount of downloads for an Oracle beta product -- more than 100,000 downloads to date,) is also freely available for independent software vendors (ISVs) and hardware vendors to distribute or embed with their applications and products. Oracle Database XE is fully compatible with the family of Oracle Database products including Oracle Standard Edition One, Oracle Standard Edition and Oracle Enterprise Edition. It comes complete with starter tutorials and access to a free online forum hosted by Oracle. Users can start small and look to license other editions of Oracle Database 10g as demand grows, without having to change their applications. Oracle Increases Developer Support In 2005, Oracle re-enforced its commitment to offer a wide range of programming interfaces that support the needs of different development communities. Oracle offers full development and deployment support for Java, Microsoft .NET, PHP, and many more environments, enabling developers to build reliable, scalable and secure applications running on any edition of Oracle Database 10g. Oracle introduced Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET, a free plug-in that enables developers to use Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 to develop and deploy .NET applications with Oracle Database 10g on Windows, Linux or UNIX platforms. Oracle greatly increased database application development productivity for PHP developers with the introduction of Zend Core for Oracle. Developed with Zend Technologies, Inc., Zend Core for Oracle enables developers to quickly build business-critical, PHP-based web applications and take full advantage of the performance, high availability, data security and scalability features of Oracle Database 10g. Oracle also unveiled Oracle HTML DB Release 2.0, a database feature that enables customers to easily build, deploy and manage secure Web applications using only a Web browser. Enterprises of all sizes are using Oracle HTML DB to consolidate, access and securely share data previously stored in distributed applications such as spreadsheets and other desktop data stores. Industry Recognition for Oracle Database Leading research firms recognized Oracle Database for its market leadership, innovation and performance. According to market research firm IDC, Oracle Database revenues grew 14.4 percent year over year and increased its relational database management systems market share lead to 41.1 percent in 2004. Much of this growth is attributed to customer adoption of grid computing and Oracle Database 10g in small and mid-sized businesses. Forrester Research recognized Oracle Real Application Clusters in a report titled "Oracle RAC Gains Momentum." Written by Forrester Senior Analyst Noel Yuhanna, the report states, "Oracle Real Application Clusters addresses two key enterprise requirements for mission critical database applications -- higher availability and scalability. Although most enterprise database management systems (DBMS) products support high-availability and scalability features, Oracle Real Application Clusters delivers the most innovative and superior solution in the industry." Oracle was also recognized for powering the world's largest commercial database, a customer data warehouse measured at 100 terabyte (TB), according to the WinterCorp 2005 TopTen Survey. This latest survey shows that Oracle powers many of the world's top 10 decision support systems (DSS) and online transaction processing (OLTP) database systems as measured by amount of data and workload throughput. Additionally, 12 systems (eight DSS and four OLTP systems) running Linux were measured -- all of them running Oracle Database. Oracle is the only database vendor whose customers posted top results across Linux, UNIX and Windows platforms.