Oracle 10g Highlights

Oracle 10g is the first version of the Oracle database to be able to make use of "grids" of computing resources and comes in two releases: release 1 (which we're discussing here) and 10g Release 2 (10.2) which further enhances the database's ability to take advantage of grid computing.

Obviously a short discussion like this can only provide an overview of the database and its features. Links to more information about Oracle 10g are available in our resources section.

What is a "grid"?

Let's start by defining a grid. The concept of grid computing can be defined as "... capacity on demand made up of low-cost parts" (Larry Ellison). In other words, grid computing enables resource allocation to happen dynamically and automatically and if you need more processing power or more disk space you just add another low-cost, commodity server or disk array to your existing set. Further a computing grid may be heterogeneous - that is independent of any particular vendor or file system.

The difference between this and the "old" way of doing things is that up until now, organisations had to have a (usually) expensive sever and disk storage system dedicated to each application. This meant each individual system had to be sized for the peak load for the application leading to under-utilized systems and extra costs. With grid computing, however, all the processing and disk resources are pooled and can therefore be sized for the aggregate peak load.

Layers of the grid

This pooling of disk and processing resources comprises the infrastructure layer of the grid.

In Oracle 10g this layer comprises several technologies:

• Oracle 10g RAC provides processing virtualization by combining multiple servers in a cluster which then acts as one unit.
• Storage virtualization is provided by ASM (Automatic Storage Management) which combines disparate storage devices into 1 pool managed by the database.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g provides a single console to manage multiple systems together as a logical group.

Oracle 10g takes the concept of the grid beyond the infrastructure layer to include an application layer and an information layer.

The application layer is provided by the Oracle Application Server as well as by the database which enables database operations to be invoked by a web service and external web services to be treated like tables in the database. This means applications do not have to be duplicated across different servers or different platforms. Instead they can remain where they are but be accessed from anywhere.

The information grid is the top layer and this is simply the concept of regarding information as a resource that is available when and where required. This is enabled in Oracle 10g by the bulk data movement technologies (such as transportable tablespaces and data pump import/export), Oracle streams for fine-grained data movement, and by the ability of Oracle to store non-relational data (OLTP cubes, XML data, geo-spatial data, etc.) in the database.

What else is in 10g?

• Automatic Storage Management (ASM) - a new utility for disk management
• Oracle Scheduler - a new utility for scheduling jobs in the database
• Oracle Database Resource Manager - for managing database resources such as parallelism and CPU time (first introduced in Oracle 9i)
• the new Automatic Database Diagnostic Manager (ADDM) - which automatically monitors database performance (using statistics stored in the new Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)) and provides recommendations to resolve issues
• Automatic Shared Memory Management - for management of the various shared memory areas
• and flashback database - a new feature that enables fast recovery from logical data corruption or user errors by restoring the whole database to its state at an earlier point in time.

This is just the highlights of Oracle 10g - there are plenty of features not even mentioned here and we've only skimmed the surface of those that have been discussed. See our Oracle resources section for links to more information.

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