Generally available since 1 September, 2009, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (DB 11g Rel 2) helps organisations reduce their IT costs, according to Mark Townsend, Oracle Server Technology Division vice-president of Product Management.

Its new features include Real Application testing and Active Data Guard which are a boon to database administrators.

“DB 11g Rel 2 reduces hardware capital costs by a factor of five times, storage costs by 10 times, upgrade costs by four times, on the other hand it improves performance by 10 times, database administrator productivity by at least twice, eliminates downtime and unused redundancy, and considerably simplifies customers' software portfolio,” said Townsend in Kuala Lumpur on 3 November.

Firstly, it reduces hardware costs by consolidating all the disparate e-mail, applications, data warehousing and other servers and storage within an enterprise's data centre into a grid comprising an in-memory database cache, a bank of real application clusters and an automatically managed storage farm, all managed from a single location by an enterprise manager.

DB 11g Rel 2 dynamically partitions the servers into clusters and dynamically assigns them to run groups of related workload, such as back office, front office, department, line-of-business and so on  based on policies and it automatically reconfigures the clusters as required for different tasks and load.

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) One Node enables a new option for mass consolidation with low entry cost to grid consolidation, automated fall-over within the grid, rolling patches and online upgrade to multi-node RAC instances.

Database capacities ramped up dramatically since 2005, from under 200 terabytes to a projected 900 terabytes in 2009, according to a 2008 Winter TopTen Survey and outpacing budget growth.

Automatic storage management (ASM) cluster file system in DB 11g Rel 2 lowers cost of storage management by virtualising and sharing storage resources, advanced data stripping for maximal input/output performance and online addition and migration of storage.

As with the dynamic clustering of servers, the ASM cluster file system clusters the storage resources in the farm into clusters for storing database files, Oracle binaries, other files and so on generated by human resource, sales, enterprise resource planning and other applications running on the respective dynamically clustered servers.

This enables general purpose clustering or local file systems, optimised disk layout, online rebalancing, mirroring, dynamic volume management, read-only snapshots and other configurations or functions.

DB 11g Rel 2 can also partition across different layers of storage, with older data, such as those pertaining to previous years being stored on slower, lower-end storage costing up to three times less per terabyte and compress active data to optimise storage resources.

Advanced online transactions processing (OLTP) compression compresses large application tables and all data types by up to four times, while improving query performance.

Currently based on an original equipment manufacturer tie-up between Sun Microsystems and Oracle, the Sun Oracle Database Machine – an Oracle Database Server grid has eight database servers, 64 cores, 400 GB of dynamic RAM. The Exadata Storage Server Grid has 14 storage servers, 5 terabytes of Smart Flash Cache – ie. solid state drives with access times as similar to memory - and 336 terabytes of disk storage.

Its Unified Server/Storage Network has 40 Gb/s Infiniband Links and 880 Gb/s aggregate throughput. The Sun Oracle Database Machine is completely fault tolerant.

This makes it the world's fastest OLTP machine with up to four times database compression for OLTP, including 1.2 terabytes compressed data in dynamic RAM and 15 terabytes compressed data in Flash Cache, it performs one million random input/output operations per second, mostly without involving physical disk input/output.

Using Smart Scan technology, it's also the world's fastest data warehousing machine and storage has got 15% faster over 10 years.

The Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server employs hybrid columnar compression which lets organisations recover between 50% and 75% of this storage capacity.

It stores data by column and compresses it, which is useful for data which is bulk loaded or moved. Query mode for data warehousing typically involves 10 times compression ratios and improves scans accordingly. Archival mode for old data typically involves from 15 to 50 times compression ratios.

Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture fully utilises redundancy with secure backups to tape and cloud storage and a fast recovery area, while it also eliminates the cost of planned downtime and lets administrators ad and remove storage and servers online, perform online upgrades, online patching and online production testing, upgrade applications online on the fly.

It can automatically manage users' storage, memory, statistics, sequential query language (SQL) tuning, backup and recovery, as well as provide advice on the status of indexing, partitioning, compression, availability and data recovery in a dashboard.

Current users of Oracle 9i Rel 2.0.8 and Oracle Database 10g Release 1.0.5, Release 2.0.2 and above, and Oracle Database 11g Rel 1.0.6 and above can upgrade to Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

Registered Oracle.com users can download Database 11g Release 2 Standard  Edition One, Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition from www.oracle.com/database/product_editions.html.  Standard Edition One and Standard Edition respectively cost US$180 and US$350 per user, both for a minimum of five users, while the Enterprise Edition costs US$47,000 per processor and is available for a single or multiple clusters with no socket limitation. The three are available for Windows, Linux, Unix and 64-bit platforms and supports an unlimited database size.

“We expect 50% of our installed base to move up from previous versions, said Townsend. “Oracle has a bigger share of the database market than Microsoft and IBM combines,” he added.

The older Oracle Express Edition 10g can be downloaded for free from www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html. It's available only for Windows and Linux platforms, requires at least 1GB of RAM and supports up to 4GB database size.