Oracle Corp is preparing to ship its first enhancement of the Rdb database it bought from Digital Equipment Corp 18 months ago, as Rdb version 7. The firm says it now has no plans to assimilate the Rdb engine into Oracle7 to provide a single successor code path, despite what it said last year. Oracle cites the 15,000-strong Rdb Advisory Council: the Council is more interested in protecting investments and providing users with development tools that work across Oracle and Rdb. There is also the money of course: Oracle says it has squeezed more revenue out of Rdb in the last year than DEC did in its last three years of ownership. And as a bonus, Oracle is building a new lab in New England to house Oracle and Rdb engineers – the Rdbers at Oracle are still working out of DEC’s offices. Rdb 7 ships in July for OpenVMS and for Digital Unix a month or two later. A Windows NT version is not expected until 1997, with the next release of the Rdb database. According to Oracle, release 7 includes improved performance and support for Oracle SQLnet, bringing secure encryption and authentication services. Rdb will also make use of Oracle Enterprise Manager, which the company announced in its Universal Server launch a few months ago. Optional extras include other tools acquired from DEC including Trace and DB Expert for performance tuning and monitoring.
