An Oracle spokesman declined a request for comment. But based on information gleaned via Web-based research, analyst interviews and Oracle's own prior statements, Oracle 11g R2 should include improvements in the following, somewhat overlapping areas:
Grid computing
Oracle Database is probably the most feature-rich database around, rivaled only by IBM's DB2. Yet, it possesses what some analysts consider an Achilles heel -- its lack of true grid capabilities.
Oracle Database, along with Microsoft's SQL Server, Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise and a few other relational databases, was built to have a "shared everything" architecture, said independent database analyst Curt Monash.
Typically in that design, one instance of an application is spread across multiple CPUs or servers, which shares a common pool of memory and disk storage. The advantage is that users can "scale up" their applications quickly if demand arises, added Pythian's Vallee.
"You can take an application from Windows to an IBM Z mainframe with literally no code changes," he said.
The downside is that Oracle's Real Application Clustering (RAC) does not easily allow multiple instances of the Oracle Database to be coordinated and run in parallel on hundreds or thousands of cheap PC servers. That sort of massive parallel computing (MPP), which Monash calls a "shared nothing" architecture, has been the trend for almost a decade, especially among Internet companies with huge data centers, such as Google Inc.
Not everyone agrees that shared-nothing architectures perform better than shared-everything ones, such as Oracle's. Kevin Closson, a performance architect in Oracle's Systems Technology Group and former CTO at storage vendor Polyserve, vehemently defends the "shared everything" approach in his blog.
But the net result is that Oracle "is way behind in the 'scale-out' world," Vallee said. "MySQL is eating its lunch in terms of Internet-scaled deployments."
The irony is that Oracle added the "g" to its database name starting with version 10, released in 2003, in order to imply the product's grid-worthiness.
Oracle is aware it is behind. At the launch of 11g in July 2007, Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle senior vice president for database server technologies, said, "We're doing a lot of work in grid technologies for the next release, which will make grid infrastructure even easier to adopt."