Oracle has announced the immediate availability of Oracle Express Server 6.3, the world`s fastest and most robust platform used for analysis of financial, customer, sales, marketing, and e-Business data. An essential component of Oracle`s data warehousing and business intelligence strategies, Express Server 6.3 delivers a new forecasting technology and ad hoc analysis capabilities for applications designed to increase market penetration and product profitability by a answering questions about customer behavior, marketing promotions and sales forecasts. Available worldwide, Express Server 6.3 combines unparalleled analytic capabilities with the fastest query throughput in the industry, as demonstrated by its record setting performance in the industry standard Analytical Processing Benchmark-1 (APB-1).
As the Internet economy accelerates an already frenzied market dynamic, the ability to quickly access and analyze market and customer data becomes essential for companies targeting defined performance objectives. Although traditional data analysis meant asking individual questions at pre-defined times, today`s busy knowledge workers needed to ask multiple questions simultaneously. Beyond its mathematical and financial functions for data analysis, Oracle Express Server enables ad hoc exploration of large, complex data sets for rapid answers to one question or hundreds posed at the same time.
Companies, such as Oracle, who continue to enhance and improve their OLAP technologies, thus enabling users to answer business questions in a consistent, timely and accurate manner, are well positioned in this market."
Synthesizing data from many sources across the enterprise, the new Express Server 6.3 offers more than 300 built-in server-based calculation functions, including several new functions for correlating forecasting, trending and statistics to empower Oracle customers with numerous types of advanced analytics across a broader range of applications. Express Server 6.3 includes the Geneva Forecasting Engine from Roadmap Technologies. The Geneva Forecasting Engine, which automates statistical analysis, predictive model building and model interpretation processes, will enable e-businesses to expedite demand planning and business forecasting processes from days to hours. Express Server 6.3 is seamlessly integrated with Oracle`s business intelligence tools, Oracle Reports and Oracle Discoverer, and offers unmatched performance with new pre-calculated aggregation and flexible partitioning routines to more quickly create information models which support user access through a variety of views.
Industry`s fastest platform for analytical applications
Oracle Express Server 6.3 delivered record-setting performance results using the industry standard Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Council APB-1 benchmark, which provides an objective measure by which to assess OLAP server performance. The industry`s fastest OLAP server achieved leadership positions on both Intel and Sun server platforms.
Oracle`s record-setting performance on Windows NT ran on four 450 MHz Intel Pentium II Xeon CPUs and 4 GB of RAM. Oracle Express Server 6.3 delivered 3,006 analytical queries per minute (AQM) for 200 concurrent users running 500,000 no think-time queries.
Oracle`s record-setting performance on Sun Solaris ran on four 300 MHz Sun UltraSparc II CPUs and 4 GB of RAM, where it delivered 3,487 analytical queries per minute for 300 concurrent users running 750,000 no think-time queries. These results further demonstrate Express Server`s scalability as query time per user remained the same despite a 50 percent increase in the number of concurrent users. The results on Sun Solaris were over three times faster than the previous AQM record set by Hyperion Essbase on an IBM RS/6000. And, Express Server 6.3 utilized slower processors, consumed half the memory, serviced more users and created a smaller database, proving Oracle Express is the most scalable, most efficient and fastest, enterprise-ready OLAP server available today.
Additionally, Express Server 6.3 set the bar for OLAP server performance on an eight- processor Sun Solaris machine. Oracle ran Express Server on a Sun E3500 with 8 GB of RAM and 8 400 MHz processors and serviced 1,200 concurrent users. Express Server 6.3 scored an incredible AQM of 13,209. This was a qualified APB-1 run on a beta version of the Solaris operating system (v2.8). It was compliant, however, with all operational aspects of the APB-1 specification. In the query phase alone, Express Server 6.3 completed 3 million queries in less time than it took Hyperion Essbase to complete 500,000 queries against equivalently defined data sources.
"The release of Express Server 6.3 further underscores Oracle`s commitment to develop and market Express as the best platform for rapid deployment of the most sophisticated analytical applications required for e-business today," said Michael Howard, vice president, Oracle`s Data Warehouse Program Office. "The new analytic functions coupled with world record-setting benchmark results across enterprise-scale platforms make Express Server the obvious choice for organizations seeking to leverage the benefits Oracle technology brings to enterprise-wide data warehousing and e-business solutions."
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