Click to view screen shot. Later this year, Oracle is expected to release a tool called Oracle iFS, which will make an Oracle8i database look like a regular disk drive in Windows Explorer, thus letting you load multimedia data using a regular file copy command. InterMedia's Locator module deserves special mention because it is so useful. It provides a set of functions for calculating location data, such as which customers are closest to which of your branch offices. Oracle unfortunately does not provide the conversion database to turn ZIP codes into the special geographic codes Locator needs, but this service is available from a number of Oracle's partner companies.
Object designs can help avoid design errors and make databases easier to maintain.
It's all pretty high-end stuff, but it really is the core focus of where Oracle is taking the database. When using packaged applications, Oracle8i comes out as a pretty decent performer, albeit with some big feature gaps. Multiversioning concurrency avoids making one user wait for another user to finish making changes to the database. This feature allows Oracle8i to push through more transactions per user than other databases can, depending on how many conflicts there are between users trying to access the same information. Being able to process long or complex queries with multiple CPUs makes a huge performance difference on multi-CPU machines, and every other database we reviewed provides intraquery parallelism as a standard feature.