More bang for your buck - This was the rallying cry of Oracle officials who yesterday in Hong Kong played up the advanced clustering prowess of the company's new feature-packed database platform - Oracle9i.
'This is the first database software that can run any packaged application with unlimited scalability and total reliability across multiple computers,' said Oracle Hong Kong marketing director Tony Banham, as he introduced the product's real application clusters function.
Speaking at the Redwood Shores California worldwide launch on Thursday, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison described 9i's clustering abilities as the holy grail of the database business.
Mr Banham said no other vendor's database, including rivals IBM's and Microsoft's, could even run packaged applications using a clustered database on the Unix and Windows operating systems.
With clustering, a company's information technology unit can string together a group of terminals or workstations attached to a common control unit or server, or a group of servers that share work and back each other up if one fails.
The type of computing power such clusters generate is usually managed by expensive mainframe computers.
Carl Olofson, program director for information and data management software research at International Data Corp, said: 'With features such as Oracle 9i's real application clusters, companies should be able to support increasingly large numbers of users on relatively inexpensive systems easily, in turn reducing the cost per user as they grow.'
