Oracle has introduced Oracle Database 11g, claiming that the latest release boasts more than 400 new features, 15 million test hours and 36,000 person-months of development. 

The release extends Oracle's database clustering, data centre automation and workload management capabilities, and introduces a multitude of new features.

Oracle Data Guard enables simultaneous read and recovery of standby databases making them available for reporting, backup, testing and 'rolling' upgrades to production databases.

Real Application Testing uses virtualisation techniques to help customers test and manage changes to their IT environment.

Oracle Database 11g also offers a host of new data partitioning and compression capabilities that form part of information lifecycle management and storage management.

Oracle Total Recall enables administrators to query data in designated tables 'as of' times in the past. This is touted as an easy, practical way to add a time dimension to data for change tracking, auditing and compliance.

Oracle Flashback Transaction enables users more easily to back out of a transaction made in error, as well as any dependent transactions.

The system supports parallel backup and restore to help improve the performance of very large databases, and hot patching which improves system availability by allowing database patches to be applied without the need to shut databases down.

Oracle 11g also includes new security features including improved Oracle Transparent Data Encryption capabilities beyond column level encryption.