For the week of June 16th, 2012:

• Exadata Customers Get Free Platinum Support from Oracle
• Quest TOAD New Release
• Happy Birthday, Oracle!

“IOUG Podcast 16-JUN-2012: ExaPlatinum / TOAD / Oracle’s Birthday”

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Platinum Support for Exadata Customers

Oracle has announced Oracle Platinum Services available at no charge as part of a standard support contract to customers with specific top-level releases of Oracle Exadata, Exalogic, and SPARC SuperCluster Servers with Exadata Sun ZF or Pillar Axiom storage.

Oracle Platinum Services are intended to provide customers with remote monitoring, faster service response times and quarterly patch updates deployed directly to their systems, ensuring high availability in mission-critical environments.  To access Oracle Platinum Services, customers install a patented monitoring gateway that will allow Oracle to deploy quarterly updates on their behalf.

Utilizing a secure connection to Oracle, Platinum customers will have access to 24×7 Remote Fault Monitoring, automatic Severity 1 SR management with system restore or product development escalations, and remote quarterly software and patch updates and deployment.

Oracle is also introducing additional paid options under it’s Advanced Services solution set including: extension of Platinum support to non-Platinum environments, such as E-Business Suite, as well as to additional competitor and customer products; end-user performance monitoring which extends monitoring all the way to the edge of the network; and a solution support center enabling organizations to have Oracle Support personnel work with them permanently on-site or by remote connection. For more information, visit oracle.com/support

New Release of Quest TOAD

A new release of Quest Software’s Tool for Oracle Application Developers came out this week.  11.5.1.2 includes a number of functional enhancements along with many bugfixes. New in this release are:

• Data Comparison between databases no longer requires DB links
• Table Data Import no longer has size restrictions on import files and supports parallel array DML with periodic commits
• Ability to export and import Application Express (APEX) applications
• DBMS XPlan-formatted explain plan output options for documentation and compatibility,
• Archive support for GZip, Jar, Tar format, and others
• Workspace support has been added to provide a snapshot and restore capability for your entire user interface window layout
• DB Health Check now includes Exadata support

The new version is available for both trial and all commercial release packages for immediate download at support.quest.com

Celebrating Oracle’s Birthday

On this day, June 16, 1977 – Oracle Corporation was officially incorporated in Santa Clara, California, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL) by then partners Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. 35 years ago, the wheels began turning which now provide the means of support for millions of people around the world.  One year later, in 1978, Oracle Version 1, written in assembly language, and running on a DEC PDP-11 under RSX, in a mere 128K of memory was compiled and then never officially released. That implementation began defining the separation between Oracle core and end-user application code.

Another year later, in 1978, SDL became Relational Software Inc. (RSI) and officially released Oracle 2, the first commercially available version of the Oracle database software, as purchased by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Legend tells us that the company decided to name the first version of its flagship product “version 2″ rather than “version 1″ because customers might have hesitated to buy the initial release of the product, mirroring the behavior of technology buyers today.

Fast forward 10 years later to 1989 when we find Oracle relocated to its present world headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. Revenues had reached over US$580 million following the release of Version 6 which included the first support for row-level locking and hot backups.

Four more years pass, and in 1992 came Oracle 7 with the fully-matured PL/SQL procedural engine and referential integrity constraint features that blasted it ahead of the competition.  The next year, all of its development frameworks became bundled with Forms and Reports becoming a unified product offering as it’s Cooperative Development Environment named Oracle Developer.

20 years after inception release, in 1998 comes Oracle 8i and OAS 4, with an increasing focus on leveraging the then growing phenomenon known collectively as the Internet. Commitment to Java is pronounced and becomes centric to every new product being released by the company.

Ten more years expire, and in 2008 we see Oracle swallow up BEA and fast-forward its own definitions for what we know today as the Oracle Fusion technology base.

Oracle’s present focus in it’s coming 35th year of continuous advancement would seem to be Big Data, the Cloud and now, even Social Media. Happy Birthday, Oracle – you’ve come a long way for what would be the first half of our lives for many of us in the world of technology!