Oracle 8 waits in the wing

Is Oracle 8 going to be the next core product for Oracle Corporation ?  By the looks of it, yes.  For Oracle Corp. is currently working on the new version which will be a cost effective solution for enterprises where thousands of transactions are taking place within seconds.
 While speaking to Computerworld on Oracle 8, Jnan Dash, vice president,  database technology, Oracle Corporation, said” “In the OLTP market, nine out of 10 top global banks still run on IIMS which is a 30-years-old-IBM solution.  The product is proprietary, and none of these banks use Unix’s open system.  They would love to have an alternative solution because the cost of ownership is very high.  This is the area that we are focusing on.”  According to Dash, Oracle Corporation with Oracle 8 is looking at providing a solution that is low-cost in terms of owneship and running costs and which is efficient, endorsing thousands of transactions per second with reliability, efficiency and security.  “These are some of the focal points in theOracle 8 product, which will be our core product,”  Dash added.
 “Oracle has been into large enterprise solutions like IBM and the others, but other companies, are providing proprietary solutions that are expensive.  Oracle has come into the picture with similar solutions that are less  expensive and more efficient,” said Dash.
 But isn’t the migration to a newer enterprise solution going to a newer enterprise solutions going to cost a bank or a company heavily in terms of time, money and the sheer risk involved?
Migration is not easy
 “ Migration is never easy ,” said Dash, “It’s not a bad of roses, it’s always painful.”
 Even so, Oracle seems hopeful for its forthcoming product and optimistic about giant banks migrating to the new solution.  “There are two reasons.  One is that there are some companies who have reached a point where they have to re-do their whole management system.  The life cycles of the applications they have been using are coming to an end.  Secondly, there are companies that are not planning to change, but who will find our solution compelling in terms of economy, efficiency and reliability,” Dash said.
 Dash, who is closely working with the team that is developing Oracle 8, claimed that the implementation of this product will promptly pay the cost of migration.  “Our plan is to help banks and enterprises migrate to the newer solution.  We will also give them a clue for data migration but I do agree that program migration is not all that easy.  Especially difficult is the redoing of the code that has been written.” Jnan Dash said.
Focal Point
Oracle, meanwhile, has focused its work on a specific area in the enterprise business-OLTP.  “What you have to work on is very high throughput to tackle the tremendous amount of transactions.  The response time has to be within seconds besides rock-solid availability,” Dash said.
 “We have very challenging examples ahead of us, such as the Fuji Bank of Tokyo, whose transaction rate per second is at least 5,000,” added Jnan Dash.  “also, the fact to be taken into consideration is that Japanese are very ATM oriented, because of which the transaction volume in Japanese banks is very high, Japanees simply  cannot afford to lose their systems for more than two minutes in a year,” Dash observed.
 The equation on which Oracle is currently working on how fast hundreds of thousands of transactions can be done in a minimum possible time in major enterprises and banks.
 “Also, we have to take care of the patience of the user.  In front of an ATM machine, for instance, if any thing takes more than a few seconds it feels like a month.  The patience of a user in front of a machine is not very strong,” Dash said.
 On-line banking systems, airline reservation systems, etc. are the extreme cases among transactional processing systems.
 “In these areas, if you lose enough money to buy three mainframes.  This is how the OLTP users think.  You cannot go to them and give them the slogan of consistency, Unix, etc.  They will kick your out of the office and tell your that they require three things.  ‘Availability, availability and availability.’  If your answer is no, they’ll ask you not to waste their time.  That’s OLTP, and we want to capture that market,”  Dash added.
 Towards this end, Oracle seems to be doing a lot of serious work.  However, the flip side of OLTP is something called decision support for the unanticipated and unpredictable questions that have to be searched from data warehouses having probably trillions of bytes of data.
 This, the data warehouse has a great role to play in policy decision-making, especially for Government departments.
 “This is the latest thing we have added in Oracle.  This year we have announced Oracle Warehouse to retrieve data from any where in the data warehouse.  The  warehouse may not necessarily contain numbers and characters.  It can contain text data, image data or even audio/video data.  It is possible to access this data even through Internet,” Dash said.