Oracle is aiming to accelerate user upgrades by simplifying management, disaster recovery and patching routines with the release last week of its 11g Database.

“We are looking at increased ease of management, particularly in Real Application Clusters [RAC] environments,” said Andrew Sutherland, Oracle European technology president. “People want to be able to upgrade more rapidly, so with this release you can create standby databases [for disaster recovery], support hot-patching and record real-time transactions.”

A Total Recall feature allows time-stamping of database changes. Another push will be deeper support for XML and data compression.

Ovum analyst David Mitchell said 11g gives firms the ability to capture a real workload and put it in a test environment. “You can see the effects on individual SQL changes so it’s more fine-grained than what was possible previously. It removes business uncertainty and can cut a test cycle from several months to days,” he explained.

The UK Oracle User Group predicted that 11g would enjoy a healthy uptake. “Our survey showed a good take-up of 10g once it had demonstrated its reliability, and 11g will be the same,” said chairman Ronan Miles.

Given recent changes relating to licensing for multicore processors, many Oracle users will be on the lookout for potential alterations to terms and conditions. Although the vendor has yet to release concrete details of licensing changes, Oracle technology senior vice-president Chris Baker said the company is engaged in “a drive to simplicity” but added, “customers are my life-blood and they want deals”.