Drat - thought this was a Wifi article about 802.11g !

Can you take more care over the headlines, please ?

I think the headlines couldnt be more descriptive. Thanks for the heads up Reg

You know that the author is a tad of an Oracle bigot, when he presents only Microsoft as a comparison to the advanced features that have been found in IBM's IDS (Informix) for several years now.

Why didn't the author compare the new release to the new "Cheetah" release or the "Viper" releases?(Informix , DB2 respectively)

Extensibility has been an area that Informix has a 10+ year lead since their fated acquisition of Illustra. (Why do you think Phil White cooked the books? ;-)

With respect to ease of use and maintenance, IDS beats them hands down.

Yes, I am an Informix bigot, even though I support all of the major players (including Oracle).

I would hope that the author would be fair and throw some punches.

But what do I know? I'm just a "nameless" punter who's tossing comments in from the peanut gallery. ;-)

-G

The Reg chappies had updated the headline by the time you came to read it - it originally said "11g's new toys". No mention of Oracle.

Quite a few of the "new" features have been implemented by skunkworks add-ons by frustrated DBAs/Analysts who cannot wait for the "Real Thing" !! Most of these are done using low(ish) level languages.

What we have here is the same thing but tarted up (i.e. dumbed down) for those "DBAs" who cannot be bothered to research further than the last notes from their Oracle "certified" DBA course !!

I also agree with Ian Grumby (see above) that some features have appeared in other databases earlier. However, it's much more fun lighting a fire under Microsoft !!

Oracle Database 11g new features document specifies :

"Oracle Database 11g is compliant with JDBC 4.0 and Java SE 5.0 for the JDBC drivers and Oracle Java Virtual Machine (JVM)."

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/oracle11g/pdf/database-11g-new-features-whitepaper.pdf

But, Oracle Dataabse does not actually support all the JDBC 4.0 features such as SQLXML.