Oracle Coherence 3.6 Gives .NET a Big Boost

To bring new levels of scalability to Microsoft.NET (News - Alert) applications and allow administrators to easily manage capacity and resources, software developer Oracle (www.oracle.com) has unveiled a new version of its distributed in-memory data grid software. With enhanced features, the new release of Coherence, version 3.6, is ready to support all major business platforms, as per the maker. In fact, according to Oracle (News - Alert), Coherence 3.6 offers organizations a higher degree of data reliability with additional security extensions, and accelerated design time.

Coherence 3.6 is a component of the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g suite, a program that can link the working memory of multiple servers to create one large virtual pool of memory called data grid. This new version is the first major upgrade in a year, and comes with 848 changes over the earlier edition, according to Oracle.

Key features of Coherence 3.6 include:

--Coherence Quorum, enabling greater control of capacity and resource management in grid and cloud environments
--Coherence Query Language (CohQL), a SQL-like query language to increase developer productivity
--Efficient query syntax to manage and use Oracle Coherence rather than using programming languages
--Transaction Framework supporting distributed transactions to deliver greater reliability for application data
--Session Provider supporting session management for Microsoft (News - Alert).NET Framework-based applications, helping to improve Web applications performance
--End-to-end Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connectivity, ensuring data privacy in a distributed environment

While Oracle’s in-memory database software TimesTen was designed to maintain a large, frequently updated database within shared memory, Coherence is structured to hold large program code in memory.

Cameron Purdy, vice president of development, at Oracle, said, “The new transaction framework and the session provider for .NET extend the benefits of Coherence to a broader base of developers and to organizations with Windows-based applications.”

“The new features in Oracle Coherence 3.6 will help solve the scaling challenges that are quite typical in large, complex, mission-critical applications,” according to Victoria Livschitz, president and CEO of Grid Dynamics.

“We believe this new release of Coherence will help customers handle these issues even more quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. The functionality introduced in Coherence 3.6, such as support for distributed transactions, will continue Coherence's tradition of providing fast, reliable access to vital enterprise data and scaling applications on economical hardware,” noted Livschitz in a statement.

Ashok Bindra is a veteran writer and editor with more than 25 years of editorial experience covering RF/wireless technologies, semiconductors and power electronics. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard