Oracle Database 10g is the first database designed for enterprise Grids, delivering the clustering and workload management, high availability and operational automation required to establish enterprise Grid computing infrastructures. Oracle Database 10g also offers customers a cost-effective data management solution, reducing the need for additional infrastructure spending, and eliminating many of the traditional, repetitive, manual administrative tasks such as performance tuning, disk and memory management.

"Just over a year ago, we established a new course for delivering information and applications in IT environments with Oracle Database 10g, delivering mainframe class quality of service on low cost storage and servers", stated Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle senior vice president, Database Server Technologies. "Oracle Database 10g Release 2 continues this focus on enterprise grid computing, with increased performance, higher availability and even greater ease-of-use, in a high quality, well proven product."

Oracle Database 10g gets faster with Release 2. New sorting techniques will greatly improve the performance of all operations doing sorting, such as queries and index creation, and may eliminate the need for costly pre-load sort operations. Improved load balancing in Oracle Real Application Clusters enables more rapid response to changing server utilization patterns across a cluster.

Oracle also continues to advance its high availability capabilities in Oracle Database 10g Release 2. The new release will feature an open Application Programme Interface (API) for Oracle's clusterware - Cluster Ready Services - that will enable higher application availability. New back-up and recovery capabilities in Release 2 will augment the existing backup-to-disk operations by also automating backup-to-tape, reducing the need for complex backup environments. New automated failover capabilities will also improve a site's ability to come back on-line quickly after a disaster, even in unattended environments. These features, in conjunction with Oracle Database 10g's enterprise Grid computing functionality, will enable customers to improve the performance and availability of their IT systems.

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 will build on the manageability features of the current release. Introduced with Oracle Database 10g, Automatic Storage Management simplifies the optimal configuration and management of storage for the database, reducing administrators' workload, and enabling customers to further lower their infrastructure costs. The new release will feature even more automated storage management operations, and an enhanced storage virtualization capability allowing easier sharing of storage resources in an enterprise Grid environment.

Additionally, administrators will discover enhanced database administrative capabilities in Oracle Database 10g Release 2, including:

• The collection of performance statistics directly from memory allowing the diagnosis of very slow or even hung environments;
• Greater awareness of the overall systems' performance in Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor, helping to detect and diagnose a greater range of performance problems; and,
• Automatic Workload Repository comparison reports provide a valuable mechanism for quick performance troubleshooting.

These and other automated management capabilities will help improve administrator productivity and efficiency, and better enable customers to achieve maximum efficiency from their enterprise grid environments.

Over the years, governments and commercial enterprises worldwide have come to rely on Oracle for its unmatched security capabilities. Oracle Database 10g Release 2 will build on those security capabilities through the addition of significant new features. The new release will feature technology for transparently encrypting critical business data and personally identifiable information used by applications without the need to rewrite those applications, and is expected to help customers to address regulatory compliance issues.

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 will incorporate several new features to increase support for application developers. The new features will include:

• The industry's first mainstream support for the W3C XML Query standard for access to XML data;
• Improved Microsoft Windows support via stored procedures implemented in the Common Runtime Language (CLR) and enhanced integration with Visual Studio; and,
• Augmented development functionality for Oracle HTML DB, the rapid Web application development tool for the Oracle Database.