The Oracle Blog

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Oracle Product Definitions for MySQLers

Oracle definitions for MySQLers (Dolphins)

OTN is the Oracle Technology Network, the URL is http://otn.oracle.com, it is the Oracle equivalent of dev.mysql.com. Contains software downloads, white papers, tutorials, forums, etc. Joining is free.
Oracle Database 11gR2 is the lastest release of the new database server and it can be downloaded on Linux systems currently. The Release 2 is important because this is the main release customers migrate to. Only early adopters usually go to a Release 1 of Oracle. Expect a lot of activity at Oracle Open World in October on the Oracle Database 11gR2 release.
Oracle Apps 11i/12i - Oracle business applications (Financials, Manufacturing, HR, etc.)
Oracle EBS is Oracle's E-Business Suite containing Oracle business applications.
Oracle Fusion Applications - next generation integration of Oracle EBS, Siebel, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft business applications.
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g - Technical foundation for Oracle Fusion business applications (Java, J2EE, Web Services, Java, BPEL, SOA, XML, ADF, Business Rules, ....)
JDeveloper is an enterprise IDE supporting database design, UML design, PL/SQL development, XML development, Java Development, etc.
Eclipse Enterprise Pack is a set of Oracle plugins for middleware development using the Eclipse IDE.
Application Express (APEX) is Oracle's native web development environment. Customers can build full blown web applications running in database server. Very fast, runs natively compiled PL/SQL in database server to generate web applications.
Oracle Weblogic Server - Application Server Oracle is basing all future middleware development on.
Oracle Enterprise Manager (Grid Control) - Very robust enterprise tool for monitoring and managing Oracle infrastructures (operating system, databases, application servers, web services, applications, ....)

Hottest New Feature in Oracle Database 11gR2

Overview of Oracle ASM

Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is volume manager and a file system that can be used to manage all storage for Oracle environments. This allows a company to strip and mirror data without having to use expensive third party volume managers. The storage management unit for ASM are disk groups. A disk group is a collection of disks that ASM manages as a single unit. ASM can distribute hot spots on a disk to distribute I/O across multiple disks. ASM provides two key advantages:

Inexpensive storage management by supporting striping and mirroring across cheap fast disks instead of purchasing expensive storage arrays.
A consistent storage management system across different operating systems.

Oracle ACFS

An exciting new feature of Oracle ASM is the Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (ACFS) is a multi-platform file system that supports storage of software, application files, executables, trace and log files, BFILEs, configuration files, audio, video, text and any other type of application data file. Key highlights:

Oracle ASM will still be used for all database files (recommended).
Oracle ACFS will manage non-database files. ACFS will not support files that can be stored in ASM.

ACFS provides:

Dynamic file system resizing.
Disk management through ASM disk groups.
Mirroring capability and protection.
Balanced I/O distribution.
ACFS can be accessed through operating file system tools and APIs.
Access capability through NAS, NFS and CIFS.
Support for hundreds of thousands of files.

The ability to have a HA file system supporting striping and mirroring across multiple platforms is pretty impressive. With what I've seen so far, this is going to be a hot new feature in Oracle 11gR2.

Labels: Oracle Database 11g New Features