Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle Corp has pipped Gupta Technologies Inc to the title of having the first Novell Inc-certified database server to come in the form of a NetWare Loadable Module. The company formally announced version 1.1 of Oracle Server for NetWare last week (CI No 1,888), having just completed certification of the product. Version 1.1 has been tweaked for speed, according to the company, which says that it significantly outperforms the earlier version, although Oracle fails to include comparative benchmarks in the announcement. The enhancements are said to come from increased use of NetWare’s Direct File System, but more importantly, the incorporation of more of the database into modules running on the server cuts down on the amount of network traffic. Oracle says that it should have the software ready in June and it will cost from #2,500 in the UK, $4,000 in the US. Oracle’s European User Group meeting in Cannes was the backdrop to the announcement of its strategy for connecting to applications running on heterogeneous systems. Apart from trying to get its application to run on every conceivable client or server set-up, the main planks are protocol-independent access to any network using its proprietary SQL*Net V2 to overcome low level network differences, and the Multiprotocol Interchange, a generic tool used by SQL*Net to receive application connection requests and forward them to other networks. These are in beta test at present, says Oracle, but they should ship by the end of the year. Around the same time, maybe a little later, the company should have the other part of the jigsaw – Open Gateway. It is a piece of software that will enable users to connect Oracle databases to any other database. Ambitious? Yes, but the company will not do all the work itself. Open Gateway provides users with the tools that they need to develop their own bespoke connections. At the moment, the company is forced to offer hard-coded application-specific gateways to its customers. The news that Oracle has only just managed to get Novell certification raises questions over the status of the certification programme. On the face of it, passing should be pretty important. The tests cover aspects of a module’s performance – such as whether it is liable to start writing over memory space and how often the module gives up control of the CPU. These are the things that a network manager wants to be certain of – a badly-behaved module can halt the entire server. Novell warns users against buying non-certified modules although both Oracle and Gupta – and the latter is 20%-owned by Novell – have been selling the things quite happily. Gupta is undergoing certification, but it can’t say when the process will be complete.
