Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

ORACLE LOOKS TO MAKE GROUND IN WINDOWS DATABASE MARKET

With the release of 10g, Oracle, a company whose database has a reputation of being expensive and complex, hopes to compete with Microsoft's SQL Server for a larger share of the database market sold on Windows, Oracle President Chuck Phillips said.

Aside from being a significant upgrade to the company's database, Oracle 10g features ease-of-use improvements that should prove attractive to companies, including small businesses, possessing less database expertise.

Among the ease-of-use improvements are a reduction from six CDs to one, and the addition of wizards for set-up tasks. The new features also would allow Oracle to bundle 10g on servers from companies like Dell.

Oracle released a version of its database called "Standard Edition One" in October. The version -- which is for single-processor servers and lacks some features of Oracle's high-end, $40,000 per processor database -- is, for now, priced at $5,995 per processor, or $195 per named user -- about $1,000 per server more than Microsoft SQL.

Oracle, which has spent much of the last year promoting its software on Intel-based servers running Linux, believes that now is the ideal time to go after the Windows market.

According to 2002 figures from Gartner, Oracle is ahead of Microsoft, and behind IBM in the overall database market. However, Microsoft's share was the fastest-growing.

Microsoft's growth was helped by cost-conscious enterprise buyers and improved scalability capabilities in its SQL Server 2000 database.

Oracle also was working hard to promote Grid computing, where groups of servers and storage equipment combined to gain greater performance. The company wants to make Grid computing a technology that is viable for the mass market, not just high-end users.