The Oracle Database 11g beta sees compression technology that can reduce the amount of storage required for data sets by up to two thirds, the ability to conduct upgrades online, and a speed boost allowing Oracle to finally beat file systems on reading data.

At Oracle's OpenWorld show here, executive vice president for server technologies Chuck Rozwat, demonstrated 11g transferring 1Gb of data in less than nine seconds compared to 12 seconds for a file system. He said Oracle "felt very good" about delivering on its speed commitment. The 11g beta comes just over a year since 10g Release 2 and as Oracle adopts a data warehousing strategy that's less of an Oracle-only play.

Oracle last week bought extract, transform, load (ETL) and integration specialist Sunopsis whose technology will be integrated with Oracle's Warehouse Builder. Sunopsis will allow Oracle users to build data warehouses connecting to systems such as MS SQL, MySQL and IBM's DB2 in their native language, while also using Oracle's own SQL and PL SQL. Oracle is also improving security and compliance with the beta release of Database Vault, which provide a fine degree of provisioning across applications and services, and Audit Vault to build a warehouse of audit information.