Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, in his keynote at OracleWorld Wednesday, said Oracle is planning more comprehensive, personalized, and proactive technical support for its customers through an improved, future version of Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Customers buy and run Enterprise Manager to establish a central supervisor of their Oracle database systems and applications. Oracle will use information captured by Enterprise Manager to keep a snapshot of a customer's configurations on file in a central My Oracle Support database. My Oracle Support is Oracle's recently announced approach to "next generation" technical support.

A Web portal behind My Oracle Support will give customers the latest information on bugs and security patches, share knowledge on problems experienced by customers with similar configurations, and provide patch alerts and information on known fixes. It will give customers a discussion forum, community groups, and other collaborative support mechanisms.

"We're going to do proactive protection against bugs in our software or in other parties' software," Ellison said. "We're going to start collecting your configurations. We'll upload them from Enterprise Manager (into an Oracle support database), a database of all known problems," he said.

A Web portal will serve as customer reference point for My Oracle Support, the recently launched approach to upgraded support, and will allow customers to air their problems and consider advice and fixes from fellow customers as well as the Oracle technical support team, Ellison continued.

In the past, a customer who had discovered a glitch in Oracle software could obtain a patch from Oracle to fix the problem. But that would leave other customers in Oracle's 345,000-strong customer base in the dark. "If a customer has a real problem and we find a bug, we want to fix it, not just for you but for everyone with a similar configuration," Ellison said.

Customers with similar configurations would be notified, "'We recommend you fix this bug.' This is a collaborative system. You will be able to see what other customers say about the patch," he added.

The process would entail Oracle data mining its Global Configuration Database, matching up problems and complaints with specific software combinations, then applying fixes.