John Marks, IT supervisor at Chesapeake Energy, finds his data growing at a rate of 75% a year. Particularly troublesome are digital images of terrain and drilling locations that must be scanned into Chesapeake's system. The image index is on one server, the images on another. If the index is down, no images can be retrieved.

By upgrading to Oracle 11g next year, Marks will be able to layer the index file system on Oracle 11g's Automatic Storage Management enhanced file management system and put both in the same database. That's insurance they will be available when needed, he says.

	Ellison uses Jedi mind trick on 43,000 faithful Photo by Kim Kulish

At a time when Oracle appears to be obsessed with applications, Chesapeake Energy is an example of why Oracle keeps getting stronger in its core database and middleware businesses. Oracle isn't adding willy-nilly to its application portfolio, although 41 acquisitions in 45 months might leave that impression. It's striving to stay competitive with Microsoft and IBM on the database front, surpass SAP in applications, and match BEA Systems and IBM in middleware.

Can any vendor sustain such a juggling act? CEO Larry Ellison claims Oracle will be the first, and he's tossing a few more balls into the air. During last week's Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Oracle announced it was moving into virtualization with a virtual machine hypervisor based on Xen. Virtualize your database servers with Oracle VM, suggested president Charles Phillips.

"Oracle VM is an enabler of grid computing, and we'll never go back to big iron," Ellison said in his keynote address. Oracle's 11g database upgrade was released in July, but with 43,000 customers in town, company officials couldn't resist showing off some of its new features. One of them, Partition Advisor, lets database administrators partition an extra-large database into more manageable chunks. New compression features let administrators shrink data down.

"The database triples every two years, and IT must buy the storage, add the power, expand the server querying capability," said Oracle senior VP Andy Mendelsohn, describing the challenge faced by many customers. Using 11g's new compression capabilities and offloading less-frequently-used data to low-cost storage, a million-dollar storage expense can be shrunk to just over $58,000, he claimed. Tiered storage is back in vogue.

Oracle's primary growth area remains enterprise applications. Oracle introduced three integration packs for the telecom industry to help automate customer order-to-billing and revenue accounting and to get customer information to service representatives. The packs consist mainly of software modules built on Oracle's Fusion middleware.

KEEP THOSE CUSTOMERS

Oracle knows it has to offer a compelling reason for customers coming from JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and other acquisitions to move to a new generation of Oracle applications. One way it's trying to do that is by embedding "SOA-enabled endpoints" in Fusion apps, giving customers different ways to build business processes and extract data.

Ellison boasted that 1,500 customers have signed up for Oracle's Unbreakable Linux technical support. Oracle is encouraging customers to deploy its database on Linux as an alternative to its main low-cost competitor, Microsoft's SQL Server.

To Michael Prince, CTO at Burlington Coat Factory, Oracle on Linux is a good idea. "We run all the Oracle we can under Linux," he says. When it comes to Linux technical support, however, he turns to IBM.