Oracle Database Insider Blog

Our Database Insider team member, John Brust, caught up with Ryan Musgrave and Javen Hall from Cat Logistics to chat about their SAP on Oracle Database with Oracle RAC implementation.

Cat Logistics provides world-class supply chain solutions and services to its parent company, Caterpillar Inc., and more than 60 other leading corporations throughout the world; managing over 25 million SKUs annually.

Cat Logistics had a 99.8% availability SLA with their legacy mainframe system they were looking to replace. They chose Oracle Database with Oracle RAC to meet this need and with the assistance of Oracle's SAP lab in Germany - the Oracle RAC install took only 2 months.

One year since the replacement - they have definitely achieved 99.8% availability for their customers. Their implementation is SAP on Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Clusterware, Oracle Grid Control and Oracle RAC running a stretch cluster (2 sites, 10 miles apart - each site having a node that has seven RAC clusters) on AIX.

This Oracle Database Insider podcast has all the details.

Let us know your HA experience with Oracle RAC.

IDC recently published a white paper that examines how Windows administrators and .NET developers can take advantage of the deep integration between Oracle Database and the Microsoft Windows and .NET platforms.

In IDC's opinion: "Though often coming without much fanfare, the interoperability initiatives between Oracle and Microsoft technologies around Oracle database support on Windows and
with .NET application development have been substantial and have seen several
iterations and improvements. Today, interoperability has reached a significant level of
depth and maturity such that Oracle database customers developing .NET
applications can truly leverage the best that these two vendors have to offer in their
respective areas of excellence."

The paper also includes a case study of how Lipper, a Thomson Reuters company, has taken advantage of Oracle and Microsoft's tight integration to achieve high-performance interoperability between the .NET and Oracle worlds in a well-supported manner that harnesses the features and capabilities of both worlds.

Click here to read the report.

Enjoy this “video podcast” discussion with Oracle Ace Director, Dan Morgan on Oracle Advanced Compression and other money saving options for Oracle Database 11g. More audio podcasts here.

The benefits of fast, predictable data warehousing performance are clear: informed decisions can be made faster and you can respond quicker to changing market and competitive conditions. Join this webcast to hear first-hand how M-Tel, one of the largest Telcom Service Providers in Europe, plans to turn the extreme performance of the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server into a competitive business advantage.

Attendees will learn how M-Tel was able to:
· Realize over 10x query performance improvements
· Improve its data reliability, availability and scalability
· Turn extreme query performance into a competitive differentiator

Willie Hardie, Vice President of Database Product Marketing at Oracle, will also discuss how Oracle’s data warehousing solutions can help all companies lower their IT costs and maximize the return on investment of their data warehousing initiatives.

Register today

The Commonwealth Bank is the most recognized brand in the Australian financial services industry and one of Australia's leading providers of integrated financial services. They rely on Oracle Database and its Maximum Availability Architecture to ensure uptime of its database systems and in the process reduce it's cost of downtime.

Listen to the Podcast

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Oracle combines its strong retail domain expertise with its industry-leading data warehousing technology with the release of the Oracle Retail Data Model, a standards-based data model optimized for Oracle data warehouses, including the HP Oracle Database Machine. With pre-built data mining, OLAP and dimensional models, it delivers industry-specific metrics and insights retailers can act on immediately to improve both top line and bottom line results.

ABC Stores, an early adopter of Oracle Retail Data Model, has this to say:

“The Oracle Retail Data Model is not just technology, it is a strategic business tool to support and drive business performance,” said Glenn T. Nishida, Chief Technology Officer, ABC Stores. “The Oracle Retail Data Model is technically engineered to satisfy retail subject areas by width and breadth of business ready prebuilt reports and analytics.”

For more information:
Read the press release
Visit www.oracle.com
Visit Oracle Technology Network

A recent study conducted by the Edison Group, entitled Comparative Management Costs Study - Oracle Database 11g vs. IBM DB2® Enterprise 9.5 quantifies how Oracle widens the manageability lead against DB2 and shows:

* Organizations can save 43% annually in database management costs using Oracle over DB2.
* DBAs can perform typical administrative functions 40% faster using Oracle Database 11g compared to IBM DB2 Enterprise 9.5.
* Oracle Database 11g requires 49% fewer steps for the same set of standard RDBMS tasks than IBM DB2 Enterprise 9.5.
* Benefiting from increased DBA productivity due to lower complexity and higher efficiency, businesses could save up to $35,155 per year per DBA by using Oracle Database 11g over IBM DB2 Enterprise 9.5.

Once more Oracle Database 11g with its industry leading self-management infrastructure, simply outperforms IBM DB2.

How is Oracle Database 11g helping your business save management costs?

Stop by the Oracle booth # 304 to talk to Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence experts, attend one of our mini-theatre sessions, and sign-up for the two-hour workshop: Oracle Data Warehousing Best Practices.

In this workshop, Oracle product developers will share lessons learned working with some of the
largest data warehousing systems in the world. The session will cover best practices for query optimization, optimizer statistics, schema design techniques, and using the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server to improve data warehouse performance. You will be able to apply the practical lessons from this workshop directly to your day-to-day job, and you can take home all related materials and scripts.

Oracle Data Warehousing Best Practices Workshop
Maria Colgan, Principal Product Manager, Oracle
Columbus A
Wednesday, May 6, 2009, 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.

You can pre-register by email: voltaire.yap@oracle.com or call 650.607.5890.

Don’t miss the Oracle keynote
Performance Comes from Venus, and Management from Mars
Frank Buytendijk, Vice President, Enterprise Performance Management, Oracle
Monday, May 4, 2009, 8:00 a.m.–8:45 a.m.