The second release of Oracle Corp’s Oracle7 relational database for multiprocessor machines is now available, and the Redwood Shores, California company claims it introduces the industry’s first Parallel Everything architecture, which adds parallel query, parallel index, parallel load, parallel back-up and parallel recovery to Oracle7’s existing parallel transaction processing capabilities. The company claims that Oracle7 7.1 running on a 20-processor Unix computer processed a 5m row, 1Gb table 15 times faster than on the single processor system, cutting database query time to 10 minutes from 150 minutes. The same parallel query run on a massively parallel machine with 100 processors ran nearly 80 times faster than a single CPU query. The new release adds Symmetric Replication, which it says is fully integrated within the database architecture for efficient, reliable data replication and administration from a single site. It includes three mechanisms, called primary site, dynamic and update anywhere replication, for managing distributed data and ensuring transaction consistency – for data updated at a single location, all changes are limited to that single site; dynamic ownership enables workflow applications with the ability to update replicated data moving from site to site, ensuring that at any given point in time only one site may update the data. Symmetric Replication with primary site support is available next month on all the major multiprocessor Unix operating systems plus Digital Equipment Corp VMS. Symmetric Replication support for dynamic and update anywhere implementations is expected to ship in the first quarter of 1995. Pricing for Oracle7 7.1 with Parallel Everything begins at $5,440 for an eight-user licence.
