Conference ulysse::rdb_vms_competition

232.0. "Oracle International Users meeting" by ATREUS::ENGBROCK () Fri Oct 28 1988 20:23

    Posted in RDB and RDB_VMS_COMPETITION notes files
    
    A friend from my past employer attended the Oracle International Users
Week on Oct 2-6 in Orlando, Fla.  He forwarded me a copy of his trip
report and I have extracted some comments of interest - for anyone's
information.  My friend is Digital friendly but with significant
investment and respect in Oracle products.

[ I went to considerable lengths to not make any of my own comments.
  This is what was heard and understood by a non Digital employee ]

- Users Week is co-sponsored by Oracle and the various user groups.
Attendance was from a wide cross-section of industries and countries.
The conference proceedings show a large number of presentations.  Tracks
and the number of presentations (most of these presentations were by
users not Oracle)
	- Applications 17 presentations
	- Database Topics 8
	- Methodology 15
	- Tools 30

- Two years ago Oracle Intl Week drew 800 participants, last year there
were 1600, this year registration was 3000.  Expected attendance next
year in Dallas (Oct 1-6) is 4000.

- Oracle is the worlds's 4th largest S/W company with expressed 
intentions to be the largest.

- Oracle remains committed to developing its products to run in as
many hardware and software environments as feasible.  [This is why
in my industry, Aerospace, that Oracle has been making the SIGNIFICANT
inroads as a DBMS providor].  Expect additional announcements for
support of multiple networking environments.

- Increased commonality in Oracle product user interfaces is a high
priority and strategy.  Bit-mapped graphics presentations for all
Oracle products will be a major thrust; mentioned support for 
X-windows, DECwindows, Mac Hyphercard, MS-windows, OS/2-PM.  For
character cell terminals UI will appear as similar as possible as 
bit-mapped.

- Macintosh mouse-drive icon manipulation and pull-down window
user interface serves as the principle paragon from which Oracle
product interfaces are modeled.  Bit-mapped graphics stations will
become more important over time and be required in order to take 
advantage of the full sophistication, ease of use, and power of
Oracle product and applications.

- Oracle Corporation stated product goals:

	- Increase overall user productivity by a factor of 10 in 88
	by better user interface features, enhancements to SQL*Forms,
	Oracle*Mail, SQL*Text/Retrieval, Oracle*CASE

	- Increase overall application performance by a factor of 10
	TPS benchmark record (160+ on a large IBM mainframe) and 
	expecting over 1000 TPS on a parallel processor machine in
	1989

- Oracle estimates cost of a typical DB2 application to be about 
$60K per TPS on an IBM mainframe vs $48K for Oracle on same machine.
The cost for the same application in VAX 6240 VMS was about $15.
Oracle's goal for 1989 is to achieve multi-user TPS costs in the
range of $2K (platform unspecified).  Also noted that a VAX 6240
runs Oracle applications quite a bit faster than an 8840 even though
an 8840 costs more.

- Oracle version 6.0 availability:
	VMS environments	November 1988
	UNIX environments	December 1988
	MVS environments	February 1989

- Oracle ver. 6.1 will be released mid-1989 and will implement the
syntax of SQL2 plus extensions that version 6.0 accepts syntactically 
but does not implement.  This include handling several forms of 
referential integrity.

- Version 7.0 will support true distributed update capability; 2-phase
commit protocol.  Schedule is not announced but seems to be 1990.

- CASE*Dictionary is an Oracle DBMS application used to support 
CASE*Method and CASE*Designer products.  Includes SQL*Forms based
menu-driven interfaces that can be used to capture some elements of
enterprise modeling (objectives, priorities, constraints, critical
success factors, functions, dataflows, and dependencies) and 
information modeling (data entities, business relationships, 
attributes, and data domains)

- CASE*Designer a graphical user interface to CASE*Dictionary that
support E-R data modeling, function hierarchy diagrams, and cross
reference matrices.  Allows database schemas to be generated and
data definitions to be normalized.  Written in C and uses X-windows.
A VAX DECwindows version is ready for release as soon as DEC releases
DECwindows.  Demoed on a SUN w/s and uVAX.  (Author noted that it holds
great promise but still needs considerable development before they could
use it)

- CASE*Method structured approach to guide strategy, analysis, and
design, build, document, and production activities.  Oriented towards
a more traditional sequential activity approach rather than an 
interative-feedback and parallel activity approach.  

- All Oracle CASE products are developed in England.

- DQL*Text/Retrieval is a new product intended to extend the use of
Oracle from defined conventional relational data structures to 
free-form text structures.  Built around SQL and extensions.  Each
individual word in the text (long fields) can be indexed or indexing
can be done for all words not on a "stop list" or indexing can be
done for all words on "hit list".  Text can be imported from any
standard text source.  Product includes full Boolean logic plus
truncation, wild cards, synonyms, proximity searching,
phonetic searching and substitute term and loosly-related term 
searching.  Oracle indicated that they are looking at issues 
pertaining to graphics capture and retrieval.  There were some
presentations by users showing application using these 
capabilities.

- Oracle*Mail integrates electronic mail as an application on
distributed Oracle databases with other database applications and
a variety of network communication services (FAX and Telex).  Oracle
applications (electronic forms) can be routed among specific 
individuals for data entry, approval, etc according to the needs
of the enterprise.  Operates with a variety of network protocols 
including X.400.

- SQL*ReportWriter provides significant productivity enhancements
to the development of reports in an Oracle environment.  Appears to
be a tool for application developers not end-users.

- Oracle's Object oriented approach.  An Oracle spokesman (Simmie
Kastner) outline Oracle's strategy for evolving towards object
oriented.  Feels there is a natural extensibilty of the relational
model and relational database capabilities to object oriented capabilities.
In the future Oracle will support strong data typing and
objects by:

	- allowing the user to define complex data types from the
	data primitives of the database manager.

	- inheritance of application functionality from base data
	type to derived data type

	- associating the data types with attributes to allow the
	relationship between objects to be expressed in relational
	terms

	- storing functions as objects in a database dependent on
	defined object types

	- introduction of an expanded SQL-based syntax known as 
	PL/SQL that will support procedural and object oriented
	syntax.  Details are still being defined but it will supprt
	all data manipulation operations, Boolean logic, exception
	handling and director cursor control.  Data record structures
	and type definitions will be obtained at run time from the
	attribute and attribute type definitions in the database.
	Several vendors demoed object oriented and knowledge based
	tools built upon Oracle databases.  VAX, Sun, Mac, HP, and
	Apollo platforms were among the hardware platforms supported
	by these products.