The Proliferation of Internet Business

Obviously the 90s will be remembered for the explosion on the Internet in both personal and business use. Today, millionaires are being made by the selling of wares over the Internet and the World Wide Web. More importantly, with many consumers online, businesses are rushing to find, sell, and support customers who “surf” the Web to buy products and conduct business.

Databases handle the pressing need to interface many users with large amounts of data. As the World Wide Web becomes more popular and useful, more and more users are going to surf to company Web sites to do business. Obviously, handling data and user requests over the Web will necessitate the use of a database, just as does a traditional configuration of data and multiple users (see Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4.  There is little fundamental difference between a traditional RDBMS and a Web-based RDBMS.

Oracle8 not only needs to provide the traditional database functions over the Web, but must offer interfaces for third-party or in-house developers to build and customize applications around this new technology. New standards, such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), and new languages, such as Java, are going to be the major Internet building tools of the future. The Oracle8 database must interface with these new standards and allow for easy interface between Web applications and the Oracle8 RDBMS.

Aside from traditional Internet business, Oracle itself is pushing the new NC (Network Computer) architecture onto the market. With network computers, the intranet becomes the basis for in-house computing. The same standards and technology that exist for the Web application will exist for the intranet, because the network computer is simply a browser requesting information from a server using similar protocols as a computer interfacing over the World Wide Web. This vision of the Network Computer points towards a standard way that all applications are built, be they applications running over the Web or simply in-house applications (see Figure 4.5).

Figure 4.5.  With the Network Computer, both Web applications and office intranets can be built using the same standards.

One important note, these new forms of applications that run through a user’s browser are called applets. When you see that name it is simply a computer program or set of programs that need to run on top of browsers and are standardized around browser technology.

Oracle8 and Data Warehousing

As the database world matured in the 1980s, in many companies, data was slowly moved off slower legacy systems and moved to newer relational databases. Over time, this led to a problem where corporate data resided in many places, because in many cases, not all legacy applications and databases were migrated. Companies had a difficult time getting the “big picture” with their data scattered all over different computer environments (see Figure 4.6).

Figure 4.6.  When data first moved off the mainframe, IS managers were like puppeteers manipulating too many puppets.

Furthermore, the earlier open systems that people moved older applications to were smaller environments than the legacy mainframes. They did not have the storage capacity or the computing architecture to handle huge amounts of data. Today that has changed, so now data is being moved from the mainframe legacy systems to the new UNIX and NT architectures.

This new residence of massive amounts of corporate data has led to the demand for data warehouses. In earlier days, Oracle worked primarily on applications that supported business directly, for instance a sales database and application. Today, Oracle is asked to also store historical data that is collected from day-to-day applications. This is really what a data warehouse is (see Figure 4.7).

Figure 4.7.  A data warehouse can store long-term data for the purpose of finding trends.

Companies are realizing the value within the piles and piles of their data, which only grows in size. By looking at this data over time, patterns can emerge that give the business person insight into specific parts of their business or overall trends within their industry.

Another new paradigm, that of OLAP (On-Line Analytic Processing) comes to us tightly woven into the new fad of data warehousing. OLAP is a loose standard which dictates strategies and look-and-feel for a tool that gives users and business analysts the ability to look at data as either separate elements or aggregates. With this tool, the mass of data within a data warehouse can make sense to the business analyst.

Oracle offers the Discoverer product, an OLAP tool, with the Oracle8 database. More importantly, within Oracle8 there are low-level methods needed to optimize the sometimes very intensive task of grouping and summarizing huge amounts of data. This enhances Oracle’s position as a major player in data warehousing.

Aside from Oracle’s Discover product, Oracle8 can handle huge masses of data faster by the use of new methods for storing and retrieving data. Without these new tricks, Oracle’s data warehouses would have serious drawbacks and would run too slowly in many cases. When you look at the Enterprise Edition of Oracle8, you will see many of its options tailored toward making access of very large databases more efficient.