Past Meeting - October 23, 2003

Learn about Oracle 10g - A Database made for Grid Computing

Thursday, October 23, 2003
6:30 P.M. - 8:00 P.M.

Sun Microsystems
Building Sun SAN05
9540 Towne Centre Drive
San Diego, CA 92121

Darryl McGowan presents	The interested attendees

Summary of the meeting

Darryl McGowan gave an excellent lecture on Oracle Clusters -- highly redundant, highly available groups of machines all under the control of the Oracle executive. If a computing element goes down, the executive rolls back its transaction then restarts its process on a different computing element. The executive itself is distributed amongst computing elements, so that it isn't susceptible to a single point of failure. The big surprise: Oracle isn't a database ... it's a whole operating system! True, it runs on top of an operating system (e.g., Solaris), but that's merely a small convenience in the scheme of things. Amazing!

Abstract

The Oracle 10g Database, introduced in September 2003, is the first database designed for enterprise grid computing, the most flexible and cost-effective way to manage enterprise information. It cuts costs of management while providing the highest possible quality of service. In addition to numerous quality and performance enhancements, Oracle Database 10g significantly reduces the costs of managing the IT environment, with a simplified install, greatly reduced configuration and management requirements, and automatic performance diagnosis and SQL tuning. These and other automated management capabilities help improve DBA and developer productivity and efficiency.

Two database technologies will be highlighted: Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Oracle Label Security (OLS).

Oracle Real Application Clusters is a cluster database with a shared cache architecture that overcomes the limitations of traditional shared nothing and shared disk approaches to provide a highly scalable and available database solutions for all your business applications. Oracle10g RAC allows large transactions to be separated into smaller ones for fast parallel execution, provides high throughput for large workloads, and scales incrementally for growing user populations.

Oracle10g Label Security builds on the Oracle virtual private database (VPD) technology which gives you the ability write security policies using Oracle PL/SQL and assign them to database tables and views. For example, an Oracle VPD policy can be written to restrict access outside normal business hours or restrict access to specific database rows based on an organizational identifier. Oracle Label Security is an out-of-the-box solution for restricting access to specific database rows based on sensitivity labels. Oracle now has a total of 17 security certifications after undergoing intensive evaluations by security experts, such as the International Common Criteria. In comparison, IBM DB2 scores 0 and Microsoft SQL Server only 1.

Presenter Bio

Darryl McGowan is a Principal Sales Consultant for the Oracle Corporation's Advanced Programs Group, a specialized group within Oracle that focusses on the unique requirements of the Space and Intelligence communities. As such, he is cleared for TS/SCI and has been responsible for presenting Oracle technology to organizations such as NIMA, NASA, NRO, NSA, DIA, CIA, and the Military Services. Mr. McGowan's technical expertise resides in the following Oracle products: Database (and all key options), Application Server, and our suite of Development Tools. He is a member of the Oracle Leadership Club, an elite, highly selective group of employees that are honored for their extensive contributions to Oracle's continued dominance in the Information Management industry. Mr. McGowan has been with Oracle for eight years. He holds a BSEE from Stanford University and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.