Oracle Corp formally launched its Oracle 8i database, essentially version 8.1 of the product, but this being the era of internet hyperbole, it is a whole lot more than that, at least according to the company. Around two and a half years ago Oracle chairman and chief executive Larry Ellison began championing network computing; his idea of having low-cost essentially dumb devices on desktops that are fed applications from central servers. Having seen that hardware dream never really come to fruition, Ellison is trying again, this time with his own company’s software, which will enable us all, apparently to do internet computing, cutting the number of local, mainly Windows NT servers around and replacing them with centralized servers running Oracle 8i, in theory at least. At the launch of Oracle8 in June last year, Ellison said something very similar, only then it was still the database for network computing. So Oracle 8i is not just a database, it is a Java development environment, Java application server and a web server that basically turns all its content into internet content, according to the company. But the delivery time is slightly shady and some of 8i’s key elements will not be available until early next year. Pricing is also not available yet, but Oracle says ISVs can have the product for free, if they join one of its expanded partner programs. Ellison went over the key elements of 8i at an expensive-looking event in New York yesterday. Central to the product is what the company claims is the first database-resident Java virtual machine written by Oracle using JDK 1.1.6 and including its own Java compiler, so Oracle developers can use both PL/SQL and Java in what Ellison claims is the world’s best Java environment. It includes Oracle’s own take on garbage collection, which features multiple collection pools, depending how long the objects are around. He claims it only uses 8% of the CPU time occupied by the Java interpreter and applications built using it are truly scalable to thousands of users. An XML parser is included, written in Java. Oracle 8i also supports SQLJ, Enterprise Java Beans 1.0 and Corba 2.0. Oracle used Java to write one of the other central components, the internet file system, or iFS. This enables any file in any 32-bit Windows file format to be dropped into the database and once indexed, searched against and used like any other object. These include word processing, spreadsheet, graphics files and web pages and whether the files in the iFS are accessed through a browser, Windows Explorer, or whatever, they will appear the same, says Oracle. The iFS only supports Windows files at the moment. Ellison says Windows was done first because it is the most widespread and because we decided to do the hardest one first, he says, never missing a chance to take a shot at Redmond. Ellison says NFS support will be next. Ellison was at pains to point out that 8i was not intended to be a replacement for Oracle application server, because it only supports Java applications inside the database. For CC++, Fortran and other applications, Oracle application server 4.0 is still the thing, he says, adding that the next version of Oracle application server will have the same server-side Java that is in 8i. Oracle says the database is also completely extensible, because it is built using components Java and any component that is not included can be written in Java, whether it is a system component or part of an application, says Ellison. The iFS will be of the free elements to 8i while the Java compiler will one of the components for which Oracle will charge, but as we do not know how much any of it is going to cost, it is impossible to know exactly how free any of these parts will be. Oracle 8i should be here by the year-end – it is out with 130 beta partners right now. The iFS will be slightly later – Ellison says it should be around the same time, but with a possible time- lapse of 60 or 90 days.
