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The upcoming release contains hundreds of new features, says Oracle vice president

By China Martens | San Francisco | Thursday, 9 November, 2006

The groundwork for the next major release of Oracle’s database, Oracle 11g, has been laid.

In a keynote address at Oracle’s OpenWorld, Chuck Rozwat, Oracle’s executive vice president of server technologies (which includes the database business) talked in general terms about 11g, which is currently in beta testing. But he didn’t commit to a final shipping date for 11g.

Rozwat dubbed 11g “a significant release” containing hundreds of new features spanning high availability, performance, scalability, manageability and what he terms “diagnosability”. The upcoming release will also focus on meeting the needs of users of very large databases (VLDBs), he says, as well as including business intelligence and content management functionality.

The next release will come with new compression technology to potentially reduce customers’ storage demands by two-thirds, Rozwat says.

Oracle has worked on the storage of unstructured data in 11g, he says. In current testing, 11g is faster at storing such data compared with traditional file systems, he says.

Typically, Oracle ships significant updates to its database every 15-18 months, although the gap can be as wide as three years.

Rozwat estimates that as of July, around half of Oracle’s customers had moved to the current version of the database, 10g, either release 1 or 2, in line with the typical adoption curve. The “g” refers to grid computing. The predecessor to 10g — 9i — was named for its internet capabilities.