Oracle has introduced Database 11g, the latest release of the popular database. The database offers more than 400 features, 15 million test hours, and 36,000 person-months of development.

Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle, said, "More than ever, our customers are facing the challenges of, rapid data growth, increased data integration, and data connectivity IT cost pressures. Oracle Database 10g pioneered grid computing, and more than half of Oracle customers have moved to that release. Oracle Database 11g delivers the key features our customers have asked for to accelerate broad adoption and growth of Oracle grids; representing real innovation, that addresses real challenges, as told to us by real customers."

Oracle Database 11g can help organizations take control of their enterprise information, gain business insight, and adapt to an increasingly changing competitive environment. To do this, the new release extends Oracle's unique database clustering, data center automation, and workload management capabilities. With secure, available and scalable grids of low-cost servers and storage, Oracle customers can tackle the most demanding transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management applications.

Oracle Database 11g features advanced self-management and automation features to help organizations meet service level agreements. For example, with organizations facing regular database and operating system software upgrades, and hardware and system changes, Oracle Database 11g introduces Oracle Real Application Testing to help customers test and manage changes to their IT environment quickly, in a controlled, cost-effective manner.

In Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Data Guard enables customers to use their standby database to improve performance in their production environments as well as provide protection from system failures and site-wide disasters. Oracle Data Guard uniquely enables simultaneous read and recovery of a single standby database, making it available for reporting, backup, testing and 'rolling' upgrades to production databases. By offloading workloads from production to a standby system, Oracle Data Guard helps enhance the performance of production systems and provides a disaster recovery solution.

Oracle Database 11g has significant new data partitioning and compression capabilities, for more cost-effective Information Lifecycle Management and storage management. Oracle Database 11g automates many manual data partitioning operations and extends existing range, hash and list partitioning to include interval, reference and virtual column partitioning. In addition, Oracle Database 11g provides a complete set of composite partitioning options, allowing storage management that is driven by business rules.

Building on its data compression capabilities, Oracle Database 11g offers advanced data compression for both structured and unstructured (LOB) data managed in transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management environments. Compression ratios of 2x to 3x or more for all data can be achieved with the new advanced compression capabilities in Oracle Database 11g.

The new release also features "Oracle Total Recall," enabling administrators to query data in designated tables "as of" earlier times in the past. This offers a practical way to add a time dimension to data for change tracking, auditing, and compliance.

Oracle Database 11g is designed to be effectively deployed on everything from small blade servers to the biggest SMP servers and clusters of all sizes. It features automated management capabilities for easy, cost-effective operation. Oracle Database 11g's ability to manage all data from traditional business information to XML and 3D spatial information makes it a suitable choice for power transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management applications