Oracle Releases Grid Control 10g Release 5!

I know I said my next entry would be about my paper for Collaborate 09, but I sat through Oracle’s webinar today about Grid Control 10gR5 and decided to write about that instead. I’ve been waiting for this release because a lot of the 11g database features have been built into the Enterprise Manager interface. Real Application Testing and Transparent Data Encryption are features that are in the 11g database, but you had to use the local Enterprise Manager to use them. Now they are built into Grid Control. The release number is 10g Release 5, but this was actually supposed to have been the 11g release. Rumor has it, and presenters at conferences have backed this up, that they were ready to call this 11g, but when the BEA purchase went through they decided to hold off on the 11g release until they evaluate revamping Grid Control to use WebLogic instead of Oracle Application Server. We shall see…

The webinar from today is supposed to be posted by tomorrow, but the slides are already there. This really does look like a very nice, feature packed, upgrade. We are on HP-UX/Intanium at my company so I have to wait a bit longer, but if you are using Windows 32 or Linux/Intel, you are good to go. Check out the Enterprise Manager page on OTN and read about the new features. The Real User Experience Insight looks to be a nice feature for measuring performance at the user level. There are accelerators already created for E-Business Suite, Seibel, and PeopleSoft. This should be fun to play with since I support PeopleSoft.

Oracle is building in their acquisitions as fast as they can. One new acquisition that was mentioned on the webinar is mValent. The acquisition was just completed a couple weeks ago and Oracle is already working to build those features into Grid Control. I’m not familiar with the mValent software at all, but apparently it is supposed to make managing complex applications even easier. It should be interesting to see how all these new features for managing complex application environments fit in with already existing plug-ins. As you will see in my later post, I have had several headaches getting the PeopleSoft plug-in implemented and if these tools turn out to be easier, it may be the end of the current plug-in model.

I better get going on my Collaborate paper. Hopefully once I finish it, I can actually write the blog posting about it. Feel free to drop me a line if you like the blog or have some suggestions. Also, I’d love to hear from you if you have had a chance to play with 10gR5!