Putting Oracle Database 11g to Work by David A. Kelly
May 2008 : Profit Magazine
Your IT staff may get excited about the nuts and bolts of a new software release, but the ultimate success of an upgrade is based on the benefit it delivers to the business. Profit took a look at Oracle’s new database—Oracle Database 11g—to get an executive’s take on it. Here are five ways it will benefit your enterprise:
Protect and manage unstructured data. Unstructured data—the volumes of information stored outside the database—is the fastest-growing type of enterprise data. From XML datatypes to geospatial objects, organizations are storing and managing more large data files—without the added protection, security, and management capabilities associated with traditional database solutions.
Oracle SecureFiles, a new feature in Oracle Database 11g, allows you to deliver this information from the database with the same speed and performance of a file system. But SecureFiles allows you to compress (for reduced storage requirements), encrypt, (for greater security) and deduplicate (for greater information accuracy) this data. By moving unstructured data into databases, you can better track and secure important data that is currently spread around your enterprise.
“We think this is the last remaining piece to really help nudge customers to move more and more of their high-value business documents out of file systems into databases, and get all the benefits of a database—the reliability, availability, security,” says Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle’s senior vice president of database server technologies. “It makes it easier for them to deal with their auditors who are always auditing them against compliance requirements.”
