Oracle Releases New Express Server 6.3

Oracle Corp., announced the immediate availability of Oracle Express Server 6.3, a platform used for analysis of financial, customer, sales, marketing, and e-Business data. A component of Oracle's data warehousing and business intelligence strategies, Express Server 6.3 delivers a new forecasting technology and analysis capabilities for applications designed to increase market penetration and product profitability by answering questions about customer behavior, marketing promotions, and sales forecasts.

"It is critical to provide information to users but it is more important to enhance the value of information through the applied use of OLAP," said Mark A. Smith, program director for META Group's Application Delivery Strategies. "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. Express Server 6.3 includes the Geneva Forecasting Engine from Roadmap Technologies. The Geneva Forecasting Engine automates statistical analysis, predictive model building, and model interpretation processes. Express Server 6.3 is integrated with Oracle's business intelligence tools, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Discoverer, and offers new pre-calculated aggregation and flexible partitioning routines.

Oracle's 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 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. Query time per user remained the same despite a 50 percent increase in the number of concurrent users.

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).

"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."

Oracle Express Server 6.3 is currently available in North America for a list price of $3,995 US per concurrent device. International pricing and availability differs by country. Information on Express Server 6.3 and Oracle's required APB-1 disclosure documents is available at http://www.oracle.com.