Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Database 10g Release 2, with improvements in performance, availability, manageability and security over the initial release.

"Oracle sets the bar for relational databases while our competitors struggle to deliver basic functionality in a timely manner," said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle. "Oracle Database 10g Release 2 builds upon the grid capabilities delivered in Release 1, while introducing significant new security capabilities. It is a comprehensive and integrated product designed to deliver the highest quality of service at the lowest cost."


Andy Mendelsohn

Since its introduction in February 2004, Oracle Database 10g has been adopted by more than 40,000 customers and by more than 15,000 partners. The most recent Gartner, IDC and Morgan Stanley database market surveys all agree that Oracle continues to increase its database market share as companies realize the benefits of grid computing. These findings underscore the trend of more and more companies moving their database infrastructure to low-cost grids of industry standard storage and servers.

Increased Grid Computing Capabilities
Oracle Database 10g Release 2 delivers increased grid computing capabilities resulting in improved performance, higher application availability and even greater ease of management. Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) remains the only database technology on the market that lets customers turn a cluster of industry standard servers into a scaleable and fault-tolerant platform for running any database workload. With Release 2, RAC scalability is improved to support up to 100 servers in a RAC cluster.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control is improved to simplify monitoring of the cluster interconnect and topology. Improved RAC load balancing enables more rapid response to changing server utilization patterns across a cluster. The new release also features an open Application Program Interface (API) for Oracle Clusterware to enable higher application availability. Enhanced Oracle Automatic Storage Management capabilities allow for easier sharing of storage resources in a grid environment.