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Oracle Fires Announcements Across SQL Server’s Bow

Oracle Corp. made a series of announcements today to show the Redwood Shores, Calif., database giant’s strength on the Windows NT platform.

The announcements came in connection with Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco and precede by less than a week the launch of Microsoft Corp.’s latest database upgrade, SQL Server 7.0, which runs exclusively on Windows NT. Oracle’s offerings also enjoy significant market share on Unix platforms.

One announcement came out of Dell Computer Corp. Dell will install Oracle8 and Oracle8 Enterprise Edition database software, both for Windows NT, on Dell’s PowerEdge enterprise servers. It is the first time a major systems company has included Oracle database software in a factory installation, according to the Dell release.

At OpenWorld, Amdahl Corp. (Sunnyvale, Calif., www.amdahl.com) and its parent company Fujitsu Ltd. (Anahiem, Calif., www.fujitsu.com) demonstrated Oracle8i Parallel Server on an eight-node Windows NT cluster using the Fujitsu Synfinity interconnect. Oracle’s Parallel Server is designed for high-volume Internet transactions and also includes Cache Fusion clustering technology, an architecture to improve recovery, online reorganization of the database and a single system view to allow a cluster of servers to appear as one system to the administrator.

Meanwhile, a proprietary research company released a survey commissioned by Oracle that indicated reluctance to deploy SQL Server 7.0 on the part of Fortune 500 IT executives. World Research Inc. (San Jose, Calif., www.survey.com) found 72 percent of executives it surveyed expressed reservations about deploying SQL Server 7.0, and 74 percent had limited or no plans for deployment.

World Research, with a client list that includes Microsoft rivals such as Netscape Communications Corp. and Sun Microsystems Computer Corp., says the survey was conducted in October and involved telephone interviews on a random sample of 100 IT executives at Fortune 500 companies. The exact phrasing of the questions was not immediately available Tuesday. --Scott Bekker, Staff Reporter

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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