Oracle Database 11g Generally Available on Microsoft Windows Platform

Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle(r) Database 11g on the Microsoft Windows platform. Oracle Database 11g on Windows helps organizations of all sizes tackle the demands of rapid data growth, changing environments, and the need to deliver higher quality of services while reducing and controlling IT costs.
"Oracle is committed to providing choice, and we continue to deliver on that promise with the release of Oracle Database 11g on Windows," said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle. "Optimized for Windows, Oracle Database 11g helps growing businesses address their increasing data management demands with unrivaled price/performance and scalability."

Optimized for Windows and .NET
Oracle Database 11g is optimized for Windows platforms and services. Administrators can take advantage of new Windows-specific features including database backup and recovery using Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service as well as enhancements in Active Directory and Kerberos integration. New features in Oracle Database 11g and enhanced integration with Windows offer a fast, reliable and secure foundation for mission-critical applications. Oracle's recent world record for price/performance with the TPC-C benchmark running Oracle Database 11g on Windows(1) demonstrates Oracle Database's ability to cost-effectively meet the needs of businesses of all sizes without compromising performance.

As a Premier partner in the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program, Oracle offers tight integration between Oracle Database and Microsoft Visual Studio. With the release of Oracle Database 11g on Windows, .NET developers will experience even faster performance and improved developer productivity. The new Oracle client result cache can significantly improve performance of repetitive queries. Oracle SecureFiles provides breakthrough performance for storage and retrieval of unstructured data such as documents, XML, images, and video. New indexing and storage methods for XML provide up to 15 times improved performance.

In previous releases, Oracle has delivered new and unique features for Windows customers such as Oracle Real Application Clusters, which turns a cluster of low-cost, industry-standard servers running Windows into a highly available, scalable and secure platform for running database and packaged applications. Oracle Database 11g is no exception and offers new capabilities, including:

* Oracle Real Application Testing enables businesses to efficiently test the changes made to their IT environment from operating systems to servers to software, reducing the risks and costs associated with such changes;

* Oracle Advanced Compression capabilities delivers compression ratios of 2x to 3x or more for all data types for added cost-effective storage of data;

* Oracle Total Recall offers an easy, practical way to query the historical changes to data for change tracking, auditing and compliance;

* Oracle Active Data Guard enhances the performance of production systems and provides a more cost-effective disaster recovery solution by enabling the offloading of resource intensive tasks such as queries and backups to a single physical standby database; and,

* Oracle Partitioning automates many manual data partitioning operations and extends existing range, hash and list partitioning to include interval, reference and virtual column partitioning.

Melbourne Health Tests Oracle Database 11g on Windows
Melbourne Health is a major public health provider in Victoria, Australia that provides comprehensive acute, sub-acute and community-based health care programs. Melbourne Health is the lead driver behind the Bio21:Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (MMIM), a platform that provides clinical researchers access to data from disparate existing databases across multiple disease types at multiple institutions, co-located in a virtual repository.

A participant in the Oracle Database 11g beta program, Melbourne Health tested DICOM image storage, metadata (image information) extraction and DICOM image retrieval, ability to anonymize the image, generation of thumbnails, and conformance validation of Oracle Database 11g on Windows and Linux platforms.

"Oracle Database 11g on Windows has provided a number of new features such as increased capabilities for management of unstructured data including medical imaging, improved data compression for managing rapidly growing volumes of data, and data encryption for securing sensitive data that we would consider implementing in support of the Bio21:MMIM project. Authorized researchers will be able to access de-identified information about an image via the MMIM SAS interface, just as they do for other clinical research data," said Dr. Marienne Hibbert, Ph.D., MMIM Project Director.

Webcast Explores IT Trends and Challenges in Windows Environment
A Webcast featuring IDC Research Vice President Carl Olofson and hosted by Oracle and Redmond Magazine, is scheduled on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT. To register to hear more about IT trends and challenges within a Windows environment, go to: http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=94296&s=1&k=9A5C333D69A9F6221FB918F5B41994E5&partnerref=oracle1

Availability
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition and Standard Edition One are generally available today on the Microsoft Windows platform. A free evaluation version of Oracle Database 11g for 32-bit Windows is available for download on the Oracle Technology Network at:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/index.html.

For more information on Oracle Database 11g, go to:
http://www.oracle.com/database.