Oracle announced that Oracle Database 11g, the latest release of the world’s most popular database, is generally available on the Linux platform. Oracle Database 11g delivers the next-generation of enterprise information management, helping customers tackle the demands of rapid data growth, changing environments, and the need to deliver higher quality of services while reducing and controlling IT costs.

“Oracle Database 11g continues the focus on grid computing by enabling grids of low-cost servers and storage to deliver fast, scalable and reliable data processing, supporting the toughest data warehousing, transaction processing, and content management environments,” said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle.

New Options Offer Customers Unique Data Management Capabilities

To provide customers with increased capabilities to help meet their broad range of data management needs, Oracle today also introduced four new options for Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition:

— Oracle Real Application Testing;
— Oracle Advanced Compression;
— Oracle Total Recall; and,
— Oracle Active Data Guard.

Many organizations want to take advantage of database and operating system upgrades, and also make hardware and system changes to meet the needs of the business. Oracle Real Application Testing helps customers reduce the time, risk and cost of testing such changes in their IT environment, in a controlled, cost-effective manner.

New compression capabilities for all types of data mean that compression ratios of 2x to 3x or more can now be achieved with Oracle Advanced Compression. Coupled with new partitioning capabilities, Oracle Advanced Compression can be used to deploy Information Lifecycle Management strategies in the database without application changes, further reducing overall storage requirements.

Oracle Total Recall enables administrators to easily maintain historical archives of changed data for compliance and business intelligence. Oracle Total Recall provides a secure, efficient, easy-to-use and application-transparent solution for long-term access to changed data.

Oracle Active Data Guard can be used to enhance the performance of production databases by offloading resource intensive operations such as queries and backups to a single physical standby database. So the return on investment for a physical standby database is greatly increased as it can be used for both disaster protection and enhancing the overall quality of service of the production environment.

Beyond these new options, Oracle Database 11g also delivers a broad range of new features and enhancements to improve enterprise information management. Oracle Database 11g features improved file storage performance, increased security functionality, significant performance enhancements to Oracle XML DB, enhanced OLAP and data warehousing capabilities, and others.