Oracle 11G

Oracle Database 11g, building on Oracle's unique ability to deliver Grid Computing, gives Oracle customers the agility to respond faster to changing business conditions, gain competitive advantage through technology innovation, and reduce costs.

With Oracle Database 11g you can:

* Adopt new technology faster with Real Application Testing
* Manage more data for less with advanced compression and partitioning
* Simplify systems by storing all your data in the Oracle Database with Oracle SecureFiles
* Maximize the ROI of disaster recovery resources with Oracle Active Data Guard
* Free critical personnel for strategic tasks with management automation
* And much, much more...

Database Manageability

Oracle Database 11g is the next generation self-managing database that helps businesses lower their IT operational costs while providing maximum performance and availability. This self-managing database automatically monitors, diagnoses and tunes itself. The Oracle Database 11g manageability features allow DBAs to become more productive, and helps their organizations reduce management costs and scale to manage the Enterprise Computing Grid.

Real Application Testing

System changes, such as hardware and software upgrades, configuration changes, etc., are essential for businesses to maintain their competitive edge as well as for compliance and security purposes. Oracle Real Application Testing helps you fully assess the effect of such system changes on real-world applications in test environments before deploying the change in production. Oracle Real Application Testing consists of two features, Database Replay and SQL Performance Analyzer. Together they enable enterprises to rapidly adopt new technologies that add value to the business while minimizing risk.

Some of the features referenced below are part of separately licensed Diagnostic Pack, Tuning Pack and Real Application Testing Option. Please refer to the Oracle Database Licensing Documentation for more details.

Optimized Storage Management

Oracle Database provides cost-effective, optimized storage management for all your data. Oracle minimizes costly I/O operations, reduces required storage capacity, and maximizes performance and utilization. Storage can be automatically managed, and optimizations transparently implemented.

Oracle Exadata

The HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server is a storage product highly optimized for use with the Oracle database. It provides database aware storage services, such as the ability to offload database processing from the database server to storage, and provides this while being transparent to SQL processing and your database applications. Exadata storage delivers dramatic performance improvements, with unlimited I/O scalability, is simple to use and manage, and delivers mission-critical availability and reliability to your enterprise. HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server Technical White Paper

ILM

Oracle Database 11g provides the ideal environment for implementing your ILM solution, because it offers a cost-effective solution, that is secure, transparent to the application and achieves all of this without compromising performance. Oracle provides an ILM assistant to help define lifecycle policies, manage data movement and report on benefits. Implementing ILM using Oracle Database 11g

Partitioning

Partitioning can improve the performance of certain queries or maintenance operations by an order of magnitude. Moreover, partitioning can greatly reduce the total cost of data ownership, using a "tiered archiving" approach of keeping older relevant information still online on low cost storage devices. Oracle Partitioning White Paper

Advanced Compression

Compression significantly reduces the storage footprint of databases through compression of structured data (numbers, characters), unstructured data (documents, spreadsheets, XML and other files) and backup data (RMAN backups and Data Pump exports). It also improves memory efficiency and provides I/O benefits, thereby maintaining or improving performance. Oracle Advanced Compression supports all database operations, including DML operations. Oracle Advanced Compression White Paper

Automatic Storage Management

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) provides a vertically integrated file system and volume manager, purpose-built for Oracle database files. ASM saves DBAs time, provides optimal performance, and allows for online storage growth and migration. Oracle Automatic Storage Management White Paper






Secure Files - The Next Generation Unstructured Data Management

Secure Files is a new feature in Oracle Database 11g that offers best solution for storing file content such as images, audio, video, PDFs, spreadsheets etc. Traditionally, relational data is stored in a database while unstructured data is stored as files in file systems. Secure Files is a major paradigm shift with the choice of files storage. Secure Files is specifically engineered to deliver high performance for file data comparable to that of traditional file systems while retaining the advantages of the Oracle database. Secure Files offers the "best-of-both-worlds" architecture from both the database and file system worlds for storing unstructured data.


Secure Files is a completely new architecture inside the Oracle Database 11g for handling file or unstructured data. It features entirely new disk formats, network protocol, space management, redo and undo formats, buffer caching, and intelligent I/O subsystem. SecureFiles represents the core infrastructure for managing unstructured content inside the Oracle database. With SecureFiles, Oracle has perfected the use of the database for storage of all enterprise data.

Key Technical Advantages

Secure Files is designed for high performance and includes advanced features typically found in high-end file systems.

* High Performance
* Deduplication
* Compression
* Encryption
* Advanced Logging

In addition to these advanced file system features, SecureFiles can take advantage of several advanced Oracle Database capabilities such as:

* Transactions, Read Consistency, Flashback
* 100% Backward Compatibility with LOB Interfaces
* Readable Standby, Consistent Backup, Point in Time Recovery
* Fine Grained Auditing, Label Security
* XML indexing, XML Queries, XPath
* Real Application Clusters
* Automatic Storage Management
* Partitioning and ILM

Data stored in SecureFiles can be accessed through both database and file system clients. SecureFiles interfaces are completely backward with LOB interfaces. More information on using SecureFiles and Migration can be found here.

Oracle Database High Availability

Databases and the Internet have enabled worldwide collaboration and information sharing by extending the reach of database applications throughout organizations and communities. Both small businesses and global enterprises have users all over the world who require access to data 24 hours a day. Without this data access, revenue and customers can be lost, penalties can be owed, and bad press can have a lasting effect on customers and a company's reputation. Building a high availability IT infrastructure is critical to the success and well being of all enterprises in today's fast moving economy.

One of the challenges in designing an HA solution is examining and addressing all the possible causes of downtime. It is important to consider causes of both unplanned and planned downtime when designing a fault tolerant and resilient IT infrastructure. Unplanned downtime is primarily the result of computer failures or data failures. Planned downtime is primarily due to data changes or system changes that must be applied to the production system.

Click on the following for a further explanation of what the critical high availability solution areas are, why they are important considerations for building a highly available solution, and what are Oracle's offerings in each of these areas.

* High Availability
* Backup & Recovery
* Disaster Recovery
* Storage Management
* Continuous Operations
* Best Practices for High Availability -- Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA)

High Availability Collateral - Oracle Database 11g
Overview: Oracle Database 11g High Availability
Technical White Paper: Oracle Data Guard 11g
Technical White Paper: Oracle Database 11g Data Repair Technologies - includes Data Recovery Advisor, RMAN, Flashback and Oracle Secure Backup

Technical White Paper: Oracle Streams 11g


Complete Oracle Database 11g and 10g High Availability Collateral Library
High Availability Backup & Recovery
Data Storage Disaster Recovery
Oracle OpenWorld Papers & Presentations Webcast Replays, Online Demonstrations