For the week of August 31st, 2012:
- Did You Miss Oracle Express’s Last Exit?
- Just in time for Oracle 11gR1’s Support Departure
- New Releases: GoldenGate 11gR2 & Postgres Plus xDB Replication Server with MMR
“IOUG Podcast 31-AUG-2012: Express and 11GR1 Go Bye-Bye / New GoldenGate & PostgreSQL MMR”
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Oracle Express’s Last Exit
Our thanks go out to Miro Consulting for reminding us this week, that the data warehousing ‘Express’ products were removed from the Oracle Technology Price List earlier this summer. They have been officially removed from the Oracle Technology Global Price Lists and are no longer available for purchase or extended support licensing.
The products that have been removed are:
- Express Server
- Express Analyzer
- Express Objects
While Oracle Express is still in use by organizations worldwide, removal from the pricing lists means the product may be at its end-of-life which also means the end of support. Express Server was originally deployed as a stand-alone multi-dimensional data store and was often bundled with the popular OLAP Applications: Financial Analyzer and Sales Analyzer (OFA/OSA) The successor to the Oracle Express product is the Oracle OLAP option for the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition.
What questions should Oracle Express users be asking themselves?
- How do I migrate/upgrade to OLAP? Is there some value in a trade-in for OLAP products?
- How should the expansion, contraction or stoppage of usage be dealt with?
There are various transition scenarios that create cost efficiencies and add value to your Oracle licensing. You should always periodically review your organization’s internal strategic technology plans for dealing with product obsolescence and bear-in-mind that when external support evaporates, you still need to conduct your business with a level of certainty and performance. There are a few Oracle licensing specialists like Miro and iAppSys out there to assist you with making 3rd-party based examinations of your product options and what you can do to minimize your organization’s cost impact while maintaining the desired level of service and preparedness for future growth and expansion. Many of our organizations have complex licensing structures that have built up over years of adding and subtracting product options, and further spider-webbed with Oracle’s own mergers and acquisitions. Sometimes an external opinion is useful to help bring our software inventories back into cost-efficient levels of coverage.
Oracle 11gR1 Support Departure
Another blip on the end-of-support newsfront is the end of Premier Support for Oracle 11g Release 1 RDBMS (11.1.x) as of August 31st, 2012. From an article in Infoworld.com this week by Chris Kanaracus, Oracle provides five years of Premier Support after a new product becomes generally available, as 11gR2 did in August 2007. After that, Extended Support is available for another three years, but at extra cost. There’s also a Sustaining Support option available for as long as customers desire to have it, but this offers fewer features, including no new patches, bug fixes, or regulatory updates.
Customers who already moved to 11gR2 still have Premier Support until January 2015.
John Matelski, president of the IOUG notes, “What I can say is that we have seen a trend whereby companies and agencies have been upgrading in a shorter time-frame to Oracle 11g than previous major releases. Also, our experience shows that it is typical for companies to wait for the second release of a database to come out before upgrading, so many may have bypassed the 11g Release 1, but will take advantage of 11g Release 2.” Matelski, who is current CIO for Gwinnett County, and soon-to-be CIO for DeKalb County, GA also noted, “Our typical methodology for major release upgrades is to stay one release behind, ensuring that all or most of the (initial release) bugs have been ironed out.”
Oracle customers are expected to have another choice for upgrading later this year or early 2013 upon the release of version 12c of the database product. A formal announcement of that edition could come at next month’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.
GoldenGate 11gR2 & Postgres Plus xDB Replication Server with MMR
Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 (R2), the latest version of Oracle’s real-time data integration solution, is now available, featuring greater support for high-volume systems, global implementations, and heterogeneous platforms while enhancing data capture and security. In addition, increased integration with existing Oracle Applications and technologies, including Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Exadata and Oracle Enterprise Manager.
EnterpriseDB, provider of PostgreSQL and Oracle database compatibility products and services, has released a public beta of its new Multi-Master Replication (MMR) capability in Postgres Plus xDB Replication Server. This will provide DBAs with improved write-availability and read-scalability, customization, database performance, as well as potential cost reductions in Oracle licensing by reducing Data Guarded configurations and replacing them with lower cost-of-ownership open sourced PostgreSQL options. General availability of Postgres Plus 9.2 with MMR is expected later this fall. To learn more or participate in the beta, visit enterprisedb.com/multi-master-replication.