Oracle Database Insider Blog

For those interested in learning more about how InfiniBand is being used in enterprise data centers to address today’s demanding I/O requirements, check out this article from InfoStor. It examines what is driving some enterprises to consider new fabrics, and delves into a few use cases for InfiniBand in the data center. The article also profiles LGR Telecommunications’ use of the HP Oracle Database Machine, which is built on an Infiniband infrastructure.

Tom Kyte, renowned Oracle DBA and founder of Ask Tom, will be presenting at three upcoming Oracle Technology Days where he will discuss the benefits of upgrading to Oracle Database 11g. Oracle experts from Advanced Customer Services and the Database Center of Excellence (COE) will also share best practices – from planning, through testing to deployment.

Oracle Technology Day is geared toward IT Managers, Architects, Database Engineers and others looking to discover new features and enhancements in Oracle Database 11g that can quickly drive measurable improvements to your existing IT infrastructure. You'll gain valuable insights on how you can quickly plan and execute your Oracle Database 11g deployment or upgrade. Don't miss this opportunity to become a key enabler in driving down computing costs and improving IT quality of service within your organization.

Register now - Tom's sessions fill up quickly!

Los Angeles, 6/16/09

Redwood Shores 6/17/09

Phoenix, 6/18/09

When you see satellite imagery of the earth in a TV newscast or in a Web mapping application, that imagery is likely to be from DigitalGlobe, an Oracle Spatial customer and partner. DigitalGlobe is a world imagery products and services company with massive amounts of data to manage, including spatial information, customer information, and transactional processing data. Almost every element of DigitalGlobe’s ground system interacts with Oracle in some way, whether it’s their customer ordering system, satellite image collection planning, or production/order fulfillment.

In its raw form, satellite imagery is some of the highest volume and most demanding data to manage. Just a few city blocks of raw imagery at high resolution can take up hundreds of megabytes. As DigitalGlobe’s imagery collection capacity and customer base have grown over the years, Oracle Database and Oracle Spatial have provided a reliable, scalable platform to accommodate the demands from DigitalGlobe’s global operations and customer base. DigitalGlobe also takes advantage of Oracle Spatial’s geodetic model, as opposed to a flat earth model, to calculate areas in any number of units.

New DigitalGlobe Web service tutorial on OTN

To ensure that Oracle users can access imagery content in simple, fast ways, DigitalGlobe has posted an in-depth tutorial on Oracle Technology Network. The tutorial explains how to use imagery content, served up as tiles, from DigitalGlobe’s imagery web service in an Oracle Fusion Middleware MapViewer based web mapping application. It first outlines how to use DigitalGlobe imagery as a basemap in a MapViewer application using the Oracle Maps Javascript API and its external tile layer interface. Then it goes into advanced usage of the various APIs, namely DigitalGlobe’s jImageConnect and ImageBuilder and MapViewer’s Oracle Maps, to query, select and display imagery collections by date, resolution, or sensor.

Display tiles from DigitalGlobe’s imagery Web service

Find out about Oracle’s spatial and location technology at oracle.com/goto/spatial
Get technical information on OTN for Oracle Spatial and Oracle Fusion Middleware MapViewer
Download the DigitalGlobe tutorial

Lorena Jurado Wins the Oracle Laser Pointer Pen

Wow - the Database Insider team asked you to show your Oracle knowledge in our last challenge! You proved to us we have A LOT of extremely knowledgeable readers!

Lorena's name was randomly drawn from the multitude of correct responses. Congrats to all of you who had the correct answers and especially Lorena.

To refresh folks, these were the questions asked in our Trivia Challenge:

Q1. What was the name for the first release of Oracle that was commercially available?
Oracle Version 2. Most of you even knew that we named the product V2, b/c we didn't think people would go for a V1 release.

Q2. What Oracle Database architecture helps with Human Error, the #1 cause of unplanned downtime?
Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) - Learn More about this best practice blueprint for high availability.

Be sure to check out our June Edition and please subscribe.

Our future editions will offer more chances to win cool stuff!

This article published by Enterprise IT Planet, discusses the use of InfiniBand in the HP Oracle Database Machine and how this new approach to data warehousing can lead to significant performance gains. The article goes on to profile LGR Telecommunication's use of the HP Oracle Database Machine to "gain new insight more quickly for important activities such as business intelligence, fraud detection, and network performance monitoring."

As announced by Larry Ellison during Oracle's Q4 analyst call, "Exadata is shaping up to be our most exciting and successful new product introduction in Oracle’s 30 year history, and last quarter Exadata continued to grow and win competitive deals in the marketplace against our three primarily competitors."

Customers around the world are selecting the Oracle Database Machine as their platform of choice for data warehousing. Today Oracle announced 20 recent global customer wins and included 6 customer quotes that describe in detail the benefits customers are realizing using Oracle Database Machine including: better performance, improved operating margins, lower overhead, enhanced service levels, and superior scalability.

For more information, read the press release.

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeling is the latest product offering to join the Oracle Database tool set. Oracle Publishing's Senior Editor, Jeff Erickson, caught up with Oracle SQL Developer product manager Sue Harper at the Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG) conference in beautiful Monterey, CA to learn more.

Mark Rittman is principal of the UK-based firm Rittman Mead, and a key speaker on business intelligence and data warehousing at the 2009 ODTUG conference. Oracle Senior Editor, Jeff Erickson, caught up to him at the conference and asked him to comment on Oracle Exadata.