What tastes better, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or Oracle 11g?

What tastes better, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or Oracle 11g?
Find out here: http://www.databasetastechallenge.com/landing/index.html
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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.

Oracle Unveils Oracle Database 11g

Oracle today introduced Oracle(r) Database 11g, the latest release of the world's most popular database. With more than 400 features, 15 million test hours, and 36,000 person-months of development, Oracle Database 11g is the most innovative and highest quality software product Oracle have ever announced.
"Oracle Database 11g, built on 30 years of design experience, delivers the next generation of enterprise information management," said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle. "More than ever, our customers are facing the challenges of, rapid data growth, increased data integration, and data connectivity IT cost pressures. Oracle Database 10g pioneered grid computing, and more than half of Oracle customers have moved to that release. Oracle Database 11g delivers the key features our customers have asked for to accelerate broad adoption and growth of Oracle grids; representing real innovation, that addresses real challenges, as told to us by real customers."

Oracle Database 11g can help organizations take control of their enterprise information, gain better business insight, and quickly and confidently adapt to an increasingly changing competitive environment. To do this, the new release extends Oracle's unique database clustering, data center automation, and workload management capabilities. With secure, highly available and scalable grids of low-cost servers and storage, Oracle customers can tackle the most demanding transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management applications.

Real Application Testing Helps Reduce Time, Risk and Cost of Change
Oracle Database 11g features advanced self-management and automation features to help organizations meet service level agreements. For example, with organizations facing regular database and operating system software upgrades, and hardware and system changes, Oracle Database 11g introduces Oracle Real Application Testing, making it the first database to help customers test and manage changes to their IT environment quickly, in a controlled, cost effective manner.

Increase Return On Investment for Disaster Recovery Solutions
In Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Data Guard enables customers to use their standby database to improve performance in their production environments as well as provide protection from system failures and site-wide disasters. Oracle Data Guard uniquely enables simultaneous read and recovery of a single standby database making it available for reporting, backup, testing and 'rolling' upgrades to production databases. By offloading workloads from production to a standby system, Oracle Data Guard helps enhance the performance of production systems and provides a more cost-effective disaster recovery solution.

Enhanced Information Lifecycle Management and Storage Management
Oracle Database 11g has significant new data partitioning and compression capabilities, for more cost-effective Information Lifecycle Management and storage management. Oracle Database 11g automates many manual data partitioning operations and extends existing range, hash and list partitioning to include interval, reference and virtual column partitioning. In addition, Oracle Database 11g provides a complete set of composite partitioning options, allowing storage management that is driven by business rules.

Building on its long-standing data compression capabilities, Oracle Database 11g offers advanced data compression for both structured and unstructured (LOB) data managed in transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management environments. Compression ratios of 2x to 3x or more for all data can be achieved with the new advanced compression capabilities in Oracle Database 11g.

Total Recall of Data Changes
The new release also features "Oracle Total Recall," enabling administrators to query data in designated tables "as of" earlier times in the past. This offers an easy, practical way to add a time dimension to data for change tracking, auditing, and compliance.

Maximum Availability of Information
Oracle has consistently led the industry in protecting database applications from planned and unplanned downtime. Oracle Database 11g continues this lead by making it easier for administrators to meet their users' availability expectations. New availability features include Oracle Flashback Transaction which makes it easy to back out a transaction made in error, as well as any dependent transactions; Parallel Backup and Restore which helps improve the backup and restore performance of very large databases; and 'hot patching,' which improves system availability by allowing database patches to be applied without the need to shut databases down. In addition, a new advisor - Data Recovery Advisor - helps administrators significantly reduce recovery downtime by automating problem investigation, intelligently determining recovery plan and handling multiple failure situations.

Oracle Fast Files
The next-generation capability for storing large objects (LOBs) such as images, large text objects, or advanced data types � including XML, medical imaging, and three-dimensional objects - within the database. Oracle Fast Files offers database applications performance fully comparable to file systems. By storing a wider range of enterprise information and retrieving it quickly and easily, enterprises can know more about their business and adapt more rapidly.

Faster XML
Oracle Database 11g includes significant performance enhancements to XML DB, a feature of Oracle database that enables customers to natively store, and manipulate XML data. Support for binary XML has been added offering customers a choice of XML storage options to match their specific application and performance requirements. XML DB also enables manipulation of XML data using industry standard interfaces with support for XQuery, Java Specification Requests (JSR)-170 and SQL/XML standards.

Transparent Encryption
Oracle Database 11g continues to build on its unmatched security capabilities through the addition of significant enhancements. The new release features improved Oracle Transparent Data Encryption capabilities beyond column level encryption. Oracle Database 11g offers tablespace encryption that can be utilized to encrypt entire tables, indexes, and other data storage. Encryption is also provided for LOBs stored in the database.

Embedded OLAP Cubes
Oracle Database 11g also provides data warehousing innovations. OLAP cubes are enhanced to behave as materialized views in the database. This allows developers to use industry standard SQL for data query, but still benefit from the high performance delivered by an OLAP cube. New Continuous Query Notification features allow applications to be immediately notified when important changes are made to database data without burdening the database with constant polling.

Connection Pooling and Query Result Caches
The performance and scalability features in Oracle Database 11g are designed to help organizations maintain a highly performant, scalable infrastructure to provide users' with the best quality of service. Oracle Database 11g further enhances Oracle's position as the industry's performance and scalability leader with new features such as Query Result Caches which improves application performance and scalability by caching and reusing the results of often called database queries and functions in database and application tiers, and Database Resident Connection Pooling which improves the scalability of web-based systems by providing connection pooling for non-multi-threaded applications.

Enhanced Application Development
Oracle Database 11g offers developers a choice of development tools, and a streamlined application development process that takes full advantage of key Oracle Database 11g features. These include new features such as Client Side Caching, Binary XML for faster application performance, XML processing, and the storing and retrieving of files. In addition, Oracle Database 11g also includes a new Java just-in-time Compiler to execute database Java procedures faster without the need for a third party compiler; native integration with Visual Studio 2005 for developing .NET applications on Oracle; Access migration tools with Oracle Application Express; and SQL Developer easy query building feature for fast coding of SQL and PL/SQL routines.

Enhanced Self-Management and Automation
The manageability features in Oracle Database 11g are designed to help organizations easily manage enterprise grids and deliver on their users' service level expectations. Oracle Database 11g introduces more self-management and automation that will help customers reduce their system management costs, while increasing performance, scalability, availability and security of their database applications. New manageability capabilities in Oracle Database 11g include Automatic SQL and memory tuning, a new Partitioning Advisor which automatically advises administrators on how to partition tables and indexes in order to improve performance, and enhanced performance diagnostics for database clusters. In addition, Oracle Database 11g includes a new Support Workbench which provides an easy-to-use interface that presents database health-related incidents to administrators along with information on how to quickly manage the resolution of incidents.

Oracle is the #1 Database: Gartner 2006 Worldwide RDBMS Market Share Reports 47.1 Percent Share for Oracle
Gartner recently published their market share numbers by operating system for 2006 based on total software revenues. According to Gartner, Oracle:

* Has 47.1 percent share (up from 46.8 percent in 2005);

* Has revenue growth of 14.9 percent, faster than the market average of 14.2 percent with US$7.2 Billions in revenues; and,

* Continues to hold more market share than its two closest competitors combined.

About Oracle Database 11g
Oracle Database is the only database designed for grid computing. With the release of Oracle Database 11g, Oracle is making the management of enterprise information easier than ever; enabling customers to know more about their business and innovate more quickly. Oracle Database 11g delivers superior performance, scalability, availability, security and ease of management on a low-cost grid of industry standard storage and servers. Oracle Database 11g is designed to be effectively deployed on everything from small blade servers to the biggest SMP servers and clusters of all sizes. It features automated management capabilities for easy, cost-effective operation. Oracle Database 11g's unique ability to manage all data from traditional business information to XML and 3D spatial information makes it the ideal choice to power transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management applications.

Oracle Announces New Releases of Developer Tools for Microsoft .NET

Building on its commitment to support the Microsoft .NET development platform, Oracle today announced it has released beta versions of Oracle(r) Data Provider for .NET and Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET that are expected to deliver enhanced ease of use and productivity capabilities for .NET developers using Oracle Database 10g. In conjunction with Oracle Data Provider for .NET, Oracle is also planning on introducing Oracle Providers for ASP.NET - which would integrate with ASP.NET Services to enable ASP.NET applications to transparently manage state and various other useful information within an Oracle Database.

The beta versions of Oracle Data Provider for .NET and Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET plan to introduce new features that greatly simplify .NET application development using Oracle Database. Both tools would incorporate significant new capabilities supporting ASP.NET, Microsoft's framework for dynamic Web sites and Web applications, and would enable developers to build .NET applications using complex data types more easily by allowing the creation of .NET custom types from Oracle abstract data types. New capabilities planned include User Defined Type support, Source Control integration, and enhanced integration with Visual Studio 2005.

The beta version of Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET is expected to feature new ASP.NET Web development support enabling developers to automatically generate code by dragging and dropping database objects onto their ASP.NET Web pages. The release is expected to also include integrated source control capabilities easing the back up and versioning of .NET applications running with Oracle Database by allowing Oracle scripts to be source controlled within Visual Studio. Additionally, the tool would offer enhanced script editing and execution allowing for easier testing and deployment. Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET is a free plug-in that enables developers to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 to develop and deploy Microsoft .NET Framework-based applications and Web services on Oracle Database 10g.

Oracle Data Provider for .NET helps developers to access information from Oracle Database more efficiently. The free product enables developers to exploit the unique performance, reliability, scalability and security capabilities of Oracle Database 10g such as application security context, clustering, and native Oracle data types such as LOBs and REF Cursors.

"Delivering deeper integration between the Oracle Database and .NET is a priority," said Mike Hichwa, vice president of Software Development, Oracle. "Our ongoing investment in these developer tools highlights our plans for .NET and is expected to enable .NET Framework-based developers to more easily take advantage of the capabilities and power of the Oracle Database."

"With ASP.NET representing a significant percentage of the Microsoft development community, this announcement is underscores Oracle's ongoing support to provide tight integration between Oracle Database and Microsoft technologies," said Dwight Davis, Vice President, Ovum.

Long-standing Oracle Commitment to Windows Platform
Since 1985, Oracle has helped thousands of customers build mission-critical database systems on the Microsoft platform. Oracle is a Premier partner in the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program, and as a result offers tight integration between Oracle Database and Microsoft Visual Studio and Windows Server 2003. Today, Oracle offers Oracle Database for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Server 2003. Additionally, Windows customers can take advantage of Oracle Real Application Clusters which allow them to turn a cluster of low-cost, industry standard servers running Windows into a highly available, scalable and secure platform for running database and packaged applications.

Pricing and Availability
Oracle offers a free, downloadable beta version of Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) at:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/dotnet/tools/index.html

A beta version of Oracle Data Provider for .NET is available for download at no cost from OTN at:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/windows/odpnet/index.html

Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.

To learn more about Oracle products for Windows, visit the Windows Server System Center on OTN at:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/windows/

To learn more about Oracle products for .NET, visit the .NET Developer Center on OTN at:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/dotnet/

Oracle 11.0.5.10 Data Access Components (ODAC) Beta Tools for .NET

Download Includes

Oracle Data Provider for .NET 1.x 11.1.0.5.10 Beta
Oracle Data Provider for .NET 2.0 11.1.0.5.10 Beta
Oracle Providers for ASP.NET 11.1.0.5.10 Beta
Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET 2003 11.1.0.5.10 Beta
Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2005 11.1.0.5.10 Beta
Oracle Services for Microsoft Transaction Server 11.1.0.3.0 Beta

Download it here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/windows/odpnet/index_11gbeta.html


What's new?

Oracle Data Provider for .NET Features
Instant Client Support: Smaller ODP.NET client installation
User-Defined Types: Map Oracle objects and collections to .NET custom types and support REFs to object types
ADO.NET 2.0 Bulk Copy: Upload large data sets into Oracle from .NET
RAC Faster Connection Failover: ODP.NET will more quickly clean up the
connections to a downed RAC node -->
Process Database Down Events: ODP.NET automatically frees connections of a downed Data Guard instance
Windows-Authenticated User Connection Pooling: Windows-authenticated connections can now be pooled.
Connection Pool Performance Counters: Monitor connection pool status

Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET Features
Visual Studio 2005 integration with Server Explorer, Data Sources Window, Dataset Designer, TableAdapter Configuration Wizard and more
Improved ASP.NET web developer support
Oracle Database script project to provide source control of Oracle scripts
SQL script editor
Built in support for executing SQL*Plus scripts
Explain plan support
Integration with Query Designer
New designer for granting/revoking privileges on schema objects
User-Defined Types: Create, explore, modify UDTs; custom class code generation for .NET applications
Data Window and Query Window enhancements

Oracle Providers for ASP.NET Features
Membership Provider: Stores and retrieves registered user information in the Oracle database
Role Provider: Stores and retrieves user role information in the Oracle database
Site Map Provider: Stores and retrieves site map information in the Oracle database
Session State Provider: Stores and retrieves session state information in the Oracle database
Profile Provider: Stores and retrieves user profile information in the Oracle database
Web Events Provider: Stores and retrieves ASP.NET health monitoring event information in the Oracle database
Web Parts Personalization Provider: Stores and retrieves personalization data in the Oracle database
Cache Dependency Provider: Automatically invalidates ASP.NET cached data based on changes made to the base data in the Oracle database