When Oracle Corp. sails into town for its giant OpenWorld conference next week it will be followed by a flotilla of vendors that plan to use the show to unveil products and services aimed at Oracle users. Following is a selection of the announcements to be made by its partners at the event.

-- Infocyclone, a startup in Tel Aviv, Israel, will introduce an appliance designed to boost database performance by storing frequently accessed data in its main memory, thus offloading work from the main server. An agent is installed on the Oracle database and, over several hours, "learns" which data is queried the most frequently, then stores that information in the appliance.

The agent monitors queries sent to the database and redirects them to the appliance where appropriate. It also keeps track of changes in the database through its log files and transfers the relevant changes to the appliance, keeping the information there up to date.

The agent can slow a database server by 1 or 2 percent, but the gains from reducing the workload on the server outweigh that cost by far, boosting the performance of complex queries as much as tenfold, according to Haim Kopans, an Infocyclone executive vice president. Applications that involve reading a lot of data, such as data warehouses and business intelligence programs, will benefit the most, he said.

"The performance of an organization often relies on the performance of its database," he said. "If the database can't perform, the organization can't do what it needs to do."

The first appliances, due for release in March or April, will be offered with 4G bytes and 16G bytes of memory and be priced at US$50,000 and $120,000, respectively, he said. By the middle of next year Infocyclone will offer a version with the 64-bit Itanium processor from Intel Corp., which has invested in the company. That version will come with as much as 64G bytes of memory.

-- Quest Software Inc. will announce Quest Central for Oracle version 2.5, an upgrade to its database management suite that includes a new "record and playback" feature, which it claimed is a first for Oracle databases. It records database problems as they occur and lets database administrators (DBAs) replay them when they're back in the office. Then they can figure out what went wrong, how to fix it and how to prevent it happening again.

The product is due for release at the end of the month for versions 7.3.4 through 9.2 of Oracle's database. It is priced from $2,400 per server, unchanged from the prior version, said spokeswoman Karen Gleason.

-- Activebase Ltd. will launch two products based on what it calls its "database network router," an appliance that manages database requests from clients, application servers and database servers. One product, ActiveBalance, is for disaster recovery and can automatically rebalance the load after a node fails in environments that use Real Application Cluster, Parallel Server and Symmetric Replication Servers. A second, ActivePool, is for speeding application performance, reducing CPU loads and improving database response times, the company said. Details of pricing and availability weren't available. ActiveBase is in Givataim, Israel.

-- New York-based Etagon Inc. will unveil two appliance servers designed to make it easier to deploy and maintain a database using Oracle's Real Application Cluster (RAC) technology. RAC lets customers run a database across multiple servers with the goal of boosting performance and reliability.

Due in the first quarter next year, the Origon 1000 and Origon 5000 use Etagon's ManageOn software to automate steps required to create new clusters and consolidate databases. They are designed for use in data centers and targeted especially at the financial services and telecommunications industries, the company said. Pricing starts at $40,000 for an Origon 1000 with four CPUs, said spokeswoman Anne-miek Hamelinck. The Origon 5000 is more powerful and starts at $50,000, she said.

-- ArtinSoft will announce new consulting services for enterprises that want to migrate from an Oracle Forms environment to a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application. The service uses Artinsoft's Freedom technology and will help enterprises to maintain the business logic, user interface and other parts of their original application, reducing the need to retrain end users, according to the company.

The service supports versions 3 through 6i of Oracle Forms and migrates PL/SQL code, objects, forms, menus and libraries to create multi-tier Java applications. The client tier is a thin JSP (Java Server Page) module or a Java application based on the Model-View-Controller pattern; the business tier is based on Oracle's Business Components for Java (BC4J). A project with an average 1,000 Oracle forms would cost between $250,000 and $500,000, though pricing will vary, according to the company. ArtinSoft is based in San Jose, Costa Rica.

-- Although it won't be at the show, Lumigent Technologies, in Acton, Massachusetts, will introduce a product that helps businesses keep audit records about who views or changes data in databases, something that can help businesses in the financial services, healthcare and biotechnology industries to comply with emerging regulatory requirements, according to the company.

A version for Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 7.0 is due Dec. 1, priced from $3,000; a version for Oracle8i for Unix and Windows is planned for next year.

ITworld.com

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