Software > DatabasesEssentials

Oracle saved the biggest news for last at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. CEO Larry Ellison took the stage Wednesday afternoon to announce two hardware products developed with Hewlett-Packard that are designed to provide very high performance for data warehousing applications.

While offering no major bombshells, Oracle announced a series of updates across its product lines on Monday, including the first patch update to its flagship 11g database.

Greenplum and Aster Data Systems, two startups involved in large-scale data analysis, announced this week that their products will support MapReduce, a programming technique originally developed by Google for parallel processing of large data sets across commodity hardware.

Oracle's technical forums have been racked with performance issues all week since the vendor upgraded the system.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison failed to preserve e-mails as well as interview materials related to a book called "Softwar" that should have been supplied in connection with a shareholder lawsuit filed in March 2001 against the company, a US federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

St. George Bank has deployed a new data warehousing solution to increase the speed and capacity of its data centre network and storage.

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008 database to manufacturing, including with the release a new Web edition of the product aimed at its hosting partners, the company said Wednesday.

EnterpriseDB on Tuesday announced that it had raised $US10 million from funders including IBM, which took a small but symbolically laden stake in the 4-year-old open-source database maker.

Security researcher David Litchfield has released technical details of a new type of attack that could give a hacker access to an Oracle database.

Oracle needs to improve patch management, an area where it's currently lagging five years behind Microsoft, according to database expert Karel Miko at Czech consultancy DCIT.

FileMaker has released version 9 of its namesake database software, FileMaker Pro, with new integration features that will simplify access to SQL data sources and Web publishing with PHP.