The Unveiling Of Oracle8 - Product Information

Oracle8 from Oracle Corp. has finally arrived. Last month I attended a full day briefing by senior Oracle management for the analyst community, where we got a closer look at this major new release by Oracle, which, by the way, appears to be rapidly gaining on Microsoft SQL Server on Windows NT.

Oracle8 design objectives include the ability to support more users and more data, while providing better performance at a lower total cost of ownership. The three major functional areas on which Oracle8 is focused are transaction processing (TP), data warehousing and object relational extensions.

In the TP space, Oracle8 has been re-architected for more efficient resource utilization. Multiple users can share a single database connection, and idle connections get added to a pool and are reused as new connections come in, rather than being deleted. Oracle also claims significant memory reductions of as much as 50 to 60 percent per process over prior releases. Oracle has enhanced replication by enabling parallel propagation, which allows multiple transactions to be replicated at one time using multiple data streams. In addition, Oracle8 lets users replicate data subsets more easily. A new message-queuing facility has also been added to support distributed business applications without requiring a separate message-queuing product.

Oracle has rewritten the backup/recovery subsystem, which is now managed by the database engine. Automated data management reduces the need for human intervention, and the associated possibility of human error, while incremental backup allows the operator to back up only modified blocks, rather than entire files. A new Java-based management console will be available shortly after the general availability of Oracle8.

Data warehousing features include significantly enlarged database size. Oracle claims Oracle8 can support tens of terabytes, whereas the company readily admits that the 7.x version was stretching the envelope at the terabyte mark. The previous limit of 254 columns has been expanded to 1,000, enabling databases with deeper and broader data.

Another new feature that facilities both management and performance is partitions. An Oracle8 table can be logically divided into partitions, which can be independently located and managed. Each partition can also have its own local index structure. If, for example, you have an orders table for the year, you can create a partition for each month. A SQL query requesting the entire year will search all 12 partitions simultaneously. A SQL query that requests records only from, say, April, will search the April partition but still do it in parallel. Parallelism is limited only by the number of available CPUs in an SMP box.

Enhanced parallelism for loads, index builds, statistics collection and constraints enforcement speed up the process of loading large volumes of data during ever-shrinking time windows.

Probably the most interesting decision support enhancement is enhanced star schema support. Oracle7 is "star-aware" and supports bitmap indexes, but Oracle8 combines these concepts with parallel bitmap star joins. Parallel bitmap star joins, which is patent-pending technology, enable the query optimizer to locate records in a large number of dimensions and join them to a large fact table much faster than before. A demo query against a 1,700,000 row fact table with six dimension tables ran in one-tenth the time under Oracle8 than it did under Oracle7.3. We look forward to audited benchmark results to validate these numbers.

Finally, Oracle8 supports complex data types, which include text, images, video, time-series and dates, which can be combined to build business objects. For example, an insurance object can include standard relational data such as policy number, customer name and customer address, along with a nested table with data on multiple drivers, or a claims object with an adjuster's report and a photograph of a damaged car. Users can write methods such as add_driver () in PL/SQL, C/C++ or Java. With the release of Oracle8.1, Oracle intends to supply a server-based Java virtual machine and compiler that will enable developers to create Java-stored procedures and triggers. Lacking, at least in this release, is support for inheritance and true encapsulation.

All together, Oracle described a wide-ranging set of features. Other vendors, especially those of specialty OLAP databases, such as Essbase from Arbot Software (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Red Brick Warehouse from Red Brick Systems (Los Gatos, Calif.), DSS Server from MicroStrategy (Vienna, Va.) and IQ from Sybase (Emeryville, Calif.), will find their market position under pressure as a result of this announcement.

Robert Craig is director, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Division, at Hurwitz Group Inc. (Newton, Mass.). Contact him at rcraig@burwitz.com or via the Web at www.hurwitz.com.

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