Oracle 11g R2 makes its debut

From InfoWorld: Oracle on Tuesday is launching version 11g Release 2 of its database, about two years after the initial version hit the market.

The new release is the product of some 1,500 developers and 15 million hours of testing, according to Mark Townsend, vice president of database product management.

One major piece is Oracle's optional Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology, which allows database workloads to be deployed across a pool of commodity hardware. This increases reliability because other servers pick up the slack in the event one fails, and the system can be scaled by adding more servers.

Customers can use 11g R2 to more easily devote specific groups of server nodes to various application workloads, such as a "front office" resource pool which supports CRM (customer relationship management) implementations and Web sites, according to an Oracle whitepaper. When a particular pool needs additional horsepower, it can draw from unassigned nodes, or nodes can be drawn from pools with lower demands.

The new release also features a new option, Oracle RAC One Node, which is aimed at less mission-critical applications, according to the paper.

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