The launch of Oracle 10g Release 2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux signifies how important Linux has become for Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle, both as a development platform, and a weapon against Microsoft Corp.

Oracle migrated its army of about 5,000 internal applications developers from Unix on RISC to Linux on Intel during 2003, so it is little surprise that Linux is a prominent operating system for any launch.

The previous launch of Oracle Database 10g in February 2004 saw it launched simultaneously on Unix and Linux, however, with a Windows version following just weeks later.

Oracle 10g Release 2 support for Windows, Unix, and other Linux distributions is expected over the next 30 to 90 days, but in the meantime Oracle’s sales force will be pushing the product on Red Hat as an alternative to Microsoft’s forthcoming SQL Server 2005.

The company is promising performance, availability, manageability, and security improvement with Release 2, as well as a more robust implementation of existing Database 10g features, including its key grid computing capabilities.

Oracle said that Release 2 increases the scalability of its Real Application Clusters technology to support up to 100 servers in a single cluster, while grid management improvement have also been made via the Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control and RAC load-balancing functionality.

The company is also introducing new security and backup and recovery technologies with Release 2, including Transparent Data Encryption to encrypt data without the need to rewrite applications, and the encryption of Oracle Recovery Manager’s backup-to-disk feature.

However, users will have to pay extra to get them. The new functionality is included in the Advanced Security option of the Enterprise Edition product, which costs an additional $10,000 per processor.

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is available to download now for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 on x86 processors. Later versions can be expected for Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Sun, IBM, and HP’s versions of Unix, and Windows.