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Building on its commitment to deliver a foundation for a modern application infrastructure, Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Coherence 3.3, an in-memory data grid and the latest hot-pluggable component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. To address growing Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) requirements, this release features enhanced performance, Quality-of-Service and clustering capabilities, tighter integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware and support for Microsoft's .NET Framework. Oracle Coherence 3.3 is now available in three editions - Standard, Enterprise and Grid. Designed to meet organizations' need to predictably scale mission-critical applications by helping to provide fast and reliable access to frequently used data, Oracle Coherence 3.3 enables customers to push data closer to the application for faster access and greater resource utilization. By automatically and dynamically partitioning data in memory across multiple servers, Oracle Coherence enables continuous data availability and transactional integrity, even in the event of a server failure. As a shared infrastructure, the offering combines data locality with local processing power to perform real-time data analysis, in-memory grid computations, and parallel transaction and event processing. Key Enhancements Extend Extreme Transaction Processing To satisfy the growing demand for XTP capabilities, Oracle rapidly tightened the integration of Oracle Coherence with components of Oracle Fusion Middleware and focused on four specific enhancements related to XTP and high- performance applications:

• Availability - The introduction of Deterministic Request Execution features;
• Clustering - Delivery of self-tuning communication capabilities, including both high-performance packet bundling and dynamic flow control;
• Performance - Enhanced multi-core support for the latest commodity server hardware; and
• Platform Support - Expanded to include Java SE version 6, and a new revision of Oracle Coherence for the Microsoft .NET Platform.

Additionally, the release enables tight integration with a number of Oracle Fusion Middleware products, including Oracle Application Server and Oracle TopLink. "As a leading provider of financial electronic commerce, our IT infrastructure supports electronic billing and payment for more than 2,000 financial services sites -- a classic extreme transaction processing environment," said Mark Prout, Vice President of Engineering Services, CheckFree. "We turned to Oracle Coherence when we realized the demands from mainstream adoption of paying bills online would ultimately outgrow the capacity of our home grown caching solution. The enhanced release of Oracle Coherence provides us the scalability we need to continue to grow our business." Designed to support Java and J2EE applications, developers can easily take advantage of Oracle Coherence features using the standard Java collections API to access and modify data, and use the standard JavaBean event model to receive data change notifications. Functionality such as HTTP Session Management is available out-of-the-box for applications. "As elements of a modern application infrastructure such as Service Oriented Architecture, Web 2.0 and Event-Driven Architecture push the scalability, reliability and performance envelope, organizations are increasingly relying on middleware to distribute application processing and more efficiently utilize resources," said Cameron Purdy, Vice President of Development, Oracle. "Combining the in-memory data grid infrastructure of Oracle Coherence with Oracle Fusion Middleware, we now offer customers a comprehensive solution to address their evolving XTP requirements." "Advanced service-oriented architecture, multichannel, Internet-enabled business models will push transactional requirements to the extreme," said Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Massimo Pezzini in an August 2006 report. "Extreme TP will dramatically affect technologies, vendor strategies and user architectures." Pricing and Availability Oracle Coherence is generally available and offered in three packages:

• Standard Edition: for small-scale applications that require data caching and sharing clustered data. Pricing starts at $4,000 per CPU;
• Enterprise Edition: for medium- to large-scale application deployments, typically in lines-of-business, that need distributed data management with capabilities such as persistence, transactions and deep integration with the application server infrastructure. Pricing starts at $10,000 per CPU; and,
• Grid Edition: for a shared enterprise-wide data services platform, typically a separate tier or core piece of infrastructure in large- scale deployments that focus on real-time analytics, transaction management, event infrastructure, and sophisticated application data- caching implementations. Pricing starts at $20,000 per CPU.

A free evaluation version of Oracle Coherence is available at its Web site.