Oracle OpenWorld, the company’s week-long convention in San Francisco, was bigger this year than ever before. More people, more lines, more products, and more technical sessions than in any previous year. So, what nuggets of information did the Cintra team pick up at OOW?
This year, the overriding theme was 12c. Whether it was 12c Database, GoldenGate, SuperCluster, Exadata, ODA or within the Oracle Cloud, everyone was buzzing about 12c.
And for good reason: Shortly before OOW this year, the first major Database patchset for 12c was released, not only providing a 12c platform stable enough to rely on for Production workloads, but also adding some key new features. Here are a few highlights of the new features within the original and new 12cR1 patchsets:
- Originally released in 12c Database:
- Oracle Multitenancy
- Increased consolidation potential with pluggable databases
- Fast provisioning and easier management
- Automatic Data Optimization
- Smart Compression and Automatic Storage Tiering
- Data Guard Far Sync
- Zero data loss over larger distances
- And many more performance, availability and security features
- New in 12c Database Patchset 12.1.0.2
- In-Memory Database
- Analytics workloads processed around 100x faster than traditional memory caches
- Big Data
- New Big Data datatypes within a traditional Oracle Database
- Ability to query Big Data sources such as Hadoop using Oracle SQL queries
The bottom line to take away from this is that 12c is now stable and mature, and provides some compelling new features that could potentially save you time and money.
Outside of Database 12c, we also picked up some exciting news around Oracle’s Engineered Systems:
- Exadata
- Greater performance with direct-to-wire InfiniBand, In-Memory Database and new resource management features
- Oracle Virtualization coming soon to Exadata
- SuperCluster
- Greater consolidation potential with zero-overhead Solaris virtualization and Oracle multitenancy
- Greater flexibility with dynamically-configurable resource allocation and backup/restore options
- Oracle Database Appliance
- Full 12c support including all new features
- Greater manageability with new snapshot and copy features, and a slicker management interface
- Exalogic
- New features around cloud services, greater performance and security, higher availability
- Exalytics
- Now over 100 applications certified to run on Exalytics
- New hardware models leveraging the latest Sun SPARC and Intel chips
- Big Data Appliance
- Full support for Oracle Data Integration Suite, and co-engineered to work with Oracle Exadata
- Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance
- New Oracle backup/recovery solution providing zero data loss from backup/restore operations with minimal Production overhead
- FS1 Flash Storage System
- Oracle Enterprise Class SAN solution leveraging combinations of Flash, SSD and SAS drives, with intelligent quality of service protocols
- Virtualized Compute Appliance
- Oracle’s answer to virtualization server farms; a highly scalable, high performance VM infrastructure, with one-button deployment
It is clear that Oracle is not only geared up with a solid portfolio of software solutions, but also a comprehensive set of converged infrastructure Engineered Systems solutions.
Last, but not least, is the fact that Oracle will now be bundling this software and hardware together in its Oracle Cloud offerings, allowing customers to take advantage of these extreme performance, uptime and security features at extremely affordable price points. Certainly a space to watch during 2015.