Oracle Pro Tips, Trends & Technology eXTRA Pinnacle Publishing http://www.pinnaclepublishing.com Issue 3.12 July 24, 2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1) Pop Quiz (answer at the end) 2) Oracle News 3) HP News 4) Books 5) Answer to the Pop Quiz --------------------------------------------------------- 1) POP QUIZ (answer at the end) --------------------------------------------------------- What is http://www.sales.oracle.com/? What is http://www.support.oracle.com/? --------------------------------------------------------- 2) ORACLE NEWS --------------------------------------------------------- Oracle recently published a press release indicating that its application server, Oracle9iAS, had achieved a superb result based on the price-to-performance metric. "According to the latest benchmark result, Oracle achieved the lowest price per business operation ever... which is 28 percent better than BEA's top price performance result and 54 percent better than IBM's top price performance result..." Find out more at the following link: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020716/sftu064_1.html Apparently Sun Microsystems got quite excited as well about Oracle's achievements, probably because the benchmark was run on Sun's servers. From our perspective, the fact that there are two reported sources for the same news provides stronger evidence that Oracle's benchmark was valid. Here's the second news release: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020716/sftu069_1.html * * * * * ***************************************************** Control all of your database platforms from a single interface... from anywhere... for FREE. Whether it's Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or DB2 UDB, with SmartDBA Cockpit from BMC Software, you can manage all of your databases from a single interface... and you can do it via your Web browser! We make managing multiple databases easy. Click here for your free software now! http://www.uptilt.com/ct.html?s=5bo,s44,5ug,jjdb,jq6p,15ma,gzai ***************************************************** * * * * * We've found more product and marketing news from Oracle, which is probably a good thing, considering the fact that we only hear about the battered stock market these days. Oracle recently announced its latest product, called Oracle Collaboration Suite. While announcing the product, Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO, credited his long-time rival Bill Gates for coming up with "the need for such a product." Being Oracle, however, this product is competing against Microsoft's Enterprise Core CAL infrastructure software. The new product enables users "to store information from e-mail, voicemail, shared folders, and group calendars in an Oracle database. It would also allow users to access the information via Microsoft Outlook..." Find out more at the following URL: http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/020711/tech_oracle_2.html * * * * * While Oracle is touting its Collaboration Suite, industry analysts are more cautious than Oracle about the product's chance of success against Microsoft's Exchange product suite. IDC analyst Mark Levitt noted that "Oracle Collaboration Suite might not necessarily persuade users to make the switch from Exchange." Nevertheless, Microsoft Exchange is somewhat vulnerable in that it's an expensive product due to probable lack of competitors. Further, earlier versions of the product had quite a number of limitations. Oracle's product strategy of centralizing all information in the database is a concept that's somewhat new to the industry. "Companies don't push the limit on the number of users per server. Instead, they generally limit it to a few hundred so that if one server goes down it does not take all the users with it." No doubt Oracle has an uphill battle. Here's the URL for the article: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nf/20020711/bs_nf/18556 --------------------------------------------------------- 3) HP NEWS --------------------------------------------------------- While some of us may gripe about Oracle's "non-documented features" a.k.a. bugs, we should be encouraged by the fact that Oracle products have a relatively long life (if you don't count Oracle PowerObjects, Project Sedona...). For instance, Oracle Forms has been around since the late 1980s in its various incarnations. Likewise for the Oracle Designer product suite. Why did I get into this? Well, the reason is that Hewlett-Packard will discontinue its Bluestone application server. HP acquired this product in January 2001 for over US $300 million. HP declined to indicate if it would forge partnerships with other application server vendors, and whether or not it would exit the market entirely. It has also not indicated how many of the 500 Bluestone employees will be laid off. With HP's exit, the application server market still has quite a few players remaining, with the dominant products being BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere. Meanwhile, Oracle is aggressively (as always) pushing its Oracle9i application server. Let's see who will remain standing in a year's time. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/companies/hewlett_packard/3670968.htm --------------------------------------------------------- 4) BOOKS --------------------------------------------------------- Oracle Press recently published a book titled ORACLE9i MOBILE. Written by Alan Yeung, Nicholas Pang, and Philip Stephenson, this book "... explains how to use and extend the mobile services available in Oracle9iAS Wireless and integrate with other Oracle technologies." It also strives to be a "... practical developer handbook for creating mobile applications on the Oracle platform ..." The main URL for the book is: http://shop.osborne.com/cgi-bin/oraclepress/007222455X.html. The book's table of contents can be downloaded from: http://www.osborne.com/products/007222455X/007222455X_toc.pdf. A chapter from the book is available for free download as well: http://www.osborne.com/products/007222455X/007222455X_ch01.pdf. --------------------------------------------------------- 5) ANSWER TO THE POP QUIZ --------------------------------------------------------- Oracle is providing online services for business users. These two sites are designed to provide businesses "... with self-service, enterprise-strength solutions..." to manage information online. The http://www.sales.oracle.com/ site is basically a CRM (customer relationship management) site, providing the users with the functionality to manage their customers. The following functions are supported: manage customers, contacts, leads, opportunities, and perform forecasting. As for http://www.support.oracle.com/, it allows the users to provide customer support services to their customers. Some of the functions include assigning requests and tasks. --------------------------------------------------------- Well, that's it for this week. I welcome your feedback, input, tips, suggestions, Web sites, and other Oracle- related news. If you send me something, please let me know whether I can use your name with your comments. I apologize in advance if I don't respond personally to each of your questions or suggestions, but I'll get to as many as I can in the eNewsletter if not personally. Garry Chan, Editor Database Architect mailto:GChan@ProcaseConsulting.com This eNewsletter is brought to you compliments of Pinnacle Publishing, Inc. Copyright(c) 2002 http://www.pinnaclepublishing.com All rights reserved.