Oracle (Overview)

• The Oracle9i Database eliminates downtime meaning it won't go down if your site fails or if your server fails.
• Oracle9i Real Application Clusters applications faster as more computers are added. (scalability)
• Oracle holds 15 international security evaluations. IBM DB2 has none. Even Microsoft SQL Server has only one. (security)
• Only the Oracle9i Database offers complete and integrated business intelligence including ETL (Extraction,Transformation and Load), analytics, and data mining. The Oracle9i Database lowers administration costs by managing all data - documents, multimedia, e-mail, xml and everything else. All content can be accessed and searched by everyone across your organization. (cost and speed)

1. Real Application Clusters

• provide unlimited scalability and high availability for packaged and custom applications by running Oracle Database in a clustered hardware configuration (managed just like a single system).
• enable all applications to exploit cluster database availability, scalability and performance with no application modifications.
• applications can treat them as a single system and do not need to be modified or partitioned to achieve near-linear cluster database scalability. This means a user can horizontally scale the database tier as demand continues to grow, without changes to the application.
• are self-tuning and adapt to the changing nature of the database workload. It dynamically shifts database resources across the cluster.
• by removing the database server as a point of failure and by failing over processing in seconds, they provide the highest fault tolerance from system failures in the industry today.
• allow access to a single database from multiple nodes of a clustered system configuration, to insulate application and database users from hardware and software failures, while providing performance that scales with the hardware environment.

• helps to effectively monitor, diagnose and plan within the Oracle database environment. Detailed explanations of tuning recommendations help to increase knowledge of system behavior providing for a consistent level of service to the end user.
• ensures high availability of mission-critical business systems by reducing the complex tasks of diagnosing and correcting performance problems.

• optimizes your Oracle database environment, avoiding costly upgrades of hardware, memory and disks.
• automated identification and tuning result in more efficient >resource utilization, higher transaction throughput and faster query performance.
• tunes every dimension of the Oracle environment, including >application SQL, access methods, environment parameters and storage optimization.
• only product that takes into account the interdependencies of >these areas, providing a holistic approach to tuning.

• enables you to evaluate, plan for and implement database schema changes to support new application requirements in the production environment.
• product reliability eliminates errors or data loss when making changes and minimizes downtime.
• built-in impact analysis, dependency correlation, change >deployment and change propagation result in rapid response to new requirements.

• extends the Oracle Enterprise Manager advanced tools to monitor the SAP R/3 environment, diagnose problems, and plan for future needs.
• the pack builds on the Oracle Enterprise Manager host and database management framework and incorporates the SAP R/3 system as a peer to its other managed services

• offers server-enforced, row level access control that enables multiple communities of users to share the same database, yet only access the rows of data that pertain to each individual user or community of users.

• protects user data exchanged across the network and lowers the cost of user administration (using industry standard encryption and >integrity algorithms).
• the ASO feature, Enterprise User Security, centralizes user authentication and authorization information within an LDAPv3 compliant directory service. Both certificate and password-based authentication are supported.

• offers all the benefits of VPD plus the ability to control access based on data sensitivity labels such as private, confidential or top secret

• enables large tables to be broken into individually managed smaller pieces, while retaining a single application-level view of the data.
• range, hash, composite (range combined with hash), and list partitioning methods are supported.

• enables companies to enhance applications with automated extraction and distribution of business intelligence, using data mining functionality embedded in Oracle Database and accessible through a Java-based API.
• the infrastructure for application developers is built to integrate business intelligence applications without having to extract the data and mine it in a specialized analytical server.

• provides a complete set of analytical functions for online analytical processing in an Oracle database.
• predictive analysis can be used to forecast market trends, predict manufacturing requirements, and build financial analysis systems, for example.
• using complex, multidimensional queries and calculations, one can derive such information as market shares and net present value.

• manages the location of information including road networks, wireless service boundaries, and geocoded customer addresses. Location-based services help users to evaluate and understand complex relationships across all types of business.
• enables decision makers to look at relationships between employees or offices,, revenue by region, customer demographics, and physical assets like roads, bridges, gas lines, and telephone and electric networks.
• provides universal access that is unique in that it stores location data only once, thereby making it available via web browsers and wireless devices and even other business applications.