I see Eddie Awad has hit the press about the July 11 launch of Oracle11g. From everything I’ve seen in this release there should be no technical reasons holding back customers’ adoption. There are certain folks out there that say every release of Oracle “is the best I’ve seen yet.” A good way to sell books for sure, but I’m not that way. I most certainly didn’t say that about Oracle 7.2! Anyway, I have been thoroughly impressed with my testing—most particularly in the area of stability. And, as I keep hinting, there are features that neither Rich Niemiec, Mike Ault nor Don Burleson have been discussing that I think will be very attractive—especially in the commodity computing space. Unfortunately I have to remind myself of the real world and how long it takes to get applications qualified for a release of the server. Let’s hope E-Biz gets there as soon as possible.
Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage 
Hi Kevin,
We’re still in the midst of upgrading to EBS 11.5.10 on 10g. And now EBS 12 and DB 11g are out. Oh Man! I just cannot imagine us going through another cycle of database/App upgrade any time soon.
By the way, a small correction, the launch is on July 11, not 13.
Regards
Hi Eddie,
I was just down visting your DBA and sys adm team…they were talking about those upgrades…sound pretty intense… Hey, next time have them invite you to the discussion…
Thanks for the data correction
So….”launch”…what exactly does that mean? That Oracle will speak publicly about what is and isn’t in 11g? That the software will be available for download? That tahiti.oracle.com will have 11g docs available? All of the above?
-Mark
Mark,
Good questions.
good point about the real world, Kevin.
this is the bit that escapes most Oracle Marketeers.
most folks are just thinking of dragging their applications and databases to full 10g running: it costs a bundle to go through these upgrade cycles, both in IT resources AND business test resources.
It’s a cost that’s hardly ever mentioned in the marketing materials for new releases. in fact, I suspect that whomever in Oracle comes up with these releases doesn’t have a clue about the hidden costs of upgrading the complex application environments out there in user-land.
case in point: in our environment we have workflows that encompass JDE in an AS400, O7 reporting databases, SQLServer databases, ECM and HCM using 10g and Peoplesoft and a DW in 10gr2.
getting this whole circus into a semblance of talking was hard enough with the 10gr2 upgrade and it cost us a huge amount of moolah.
it’s gonna be years, literally, before we can convince the $$$ guys to cough up again for another upgrade! meanwhile, there will be a lot of idiots out there telling us that the best way to handle the large number of bugs in 10g is to upgrade to 11. as if it was a cheap and simple exercise of just plonking an install in a vmware partition!
but the show must go on, who cares about a mere few hundred bugs? wait until the ones from 11 start to show up, there is always 12g to excuse those. and a lot of “dinossaur” dbas to blame for “not wanting” to upgrade…
Noon,
It is the single biggest problem Oracle has to face–upgrades that is. The whole client-server split was supposed to make it simple to plop in a newer backed. Maybe as more and more content gets managed inside Oracle databases it will be simpler to eyeball a “back-end only upgrade?” As it stands now, it seems more like a ball of string sort of picture. I don’t pretend to understand all those ramifications. But I do understand it is a huge problem.
I completely agree with Noon that there is a huge cost associated with these types of technical upgrades. We started our journey to upgrade our 11.5.9 applications from 9.2.0.6 last year in October and it will finally be implemented in our production environment in July. Anytime there are mission critical systems involved and the promote-to-production methodology is followed, it is bound to take this much time if you want to delive a quality release to the business.
Kevin,
Are there any enhancements done to the Clusterware in 11G? Would you be able to briefly talk about them if the NDA does not prohibit you from it.
Amir,
Don’t look for architectural improvements…newer code is generally better, right ?