The Itanium Solutions Blog

Jewelry manufacturer Stuller is offering up some good economic news from the gulf region. The Lafayette, La.-based company is experiencing significant growth with more than 4,000 orders per day from over 30,000 customers. Stuller was running its Oracle databases and ERP software on a 10-year-old HP Superdome server. But transaction peaks during holidays were straining the system. Stuller also wanted to upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, which wasn’t possible on its existing Superdome.

While considering the various platform options, concerns about performance and uptime were paramount. The company ended up choosing HP and Itanium over IBM Power thanks in part to its existing relationship with HP. Stuller’s Chief Technology Officer, Carol Skarlat, said:

Read more in an article from SearchOracle.com.

Article Abstract: For more than 20 years, the Oracle Rdb database engine has created subroutines of executable code generated at run time. Native executable code streams for VAX and Alpha architectures are generated. When moving to the Itanium architecture, an instruction emulation environment was initially employed to speed development and product introduction. This emulation environment has been transitioned to generation of native Itanium instruction streams. This paper discusses the environment and development of the run-time executable code generation within the Oracle Rdb database engine on Itanium OpenVMS systems.

Author Bio: Norman J. Lastovica is a Senior Managing Engineer within Oracle’s Rdb Engineering organization. Mr. Lastovica has over 25 years experience with large OpenVMS systems design and development including several major Oracle Rdb benchmark and prototyping efforts on behalf of Rdb customers. Currently leader of the KODA project team, he shares responsibility for the physical data storage, index, journaling, recovery, row cache, hot standby, and LogMiner components of the Rdb product family.

Get the paper here.

Steven Chan recently reported on the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog that Oracle Database 10g Release 2 version 10.2.0.4 is now certified on Windows Server 2003 with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (12.0.4 or higher, 12.1.1 or higher) on Windows Itanium.

This ‘database-tier only’ certification means the application tier must be on a different fully certified E-Business Suite R12 platform. Customers can now apply the 12.1.1 Maintenance Pack to upgrade their application tier to 12.1.1 while running the 10gR2 database on this platform.

Read the original post here.

HP Japan and Oracle Japan are conducting “in house” IT infrastructure verification at the Oracle GRID Center in Japan. This collaboration allows the companies to conduct a joint verification of Oracle Database 11g R2 on Itanium 9300 Series-based processors from HP. In addition, older versions of Oracle DB and HP are being verified to ensure a smooth transition for the latest server environment. Although the web page is in Japanese, Google translate gives a good picture of their solution. Get Details Here.

Hello, Everyone! I’m back with recent news about our Java for Itanium project. As a reminder, Intel collaborates with Oracle (Sun Microsystems before it was acquired) on porting Oracle’s J2SE implementation to Itanium® architecture, for the Linux and Windows operating systems. We have done three more releases since my last post in November, 2009. The JDK6u18 was a major update which included compressed object pointers and the Garbage First (G1) garbage collector ported to Itanium, as well as further improvements to performance and quality. Please note that the G1 garbage collector is still considered experimental and is not recommended for production use. After JDK6u18 we did a regular security update release (labeled 6u19) with a number of vulnerabilities and other bug fixes, done largely in the common code as described in the 6u19 release notes. Our latest release was JDK6u20, a security update with a few vulnerabilities fixed in files which are not generally used for the Itanium port. Regardless, you will likely want to use the most recent version available from the Java SE download page .

We continue working on future releases, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. The next release is planned for July and will include additional enhancements for better performance on some workloads, as well as further quality improvements. I’ll continue posting as anything considerable happens on our project. Meanwhile, don’t hesitate to add your comments. Thanks for all your interest to date!