Oracle declined to comment this week about any new products it has in the works. But users and analysts said they expect the next database release to include enhancements to the software's grid computing, clustering and XML capabilities as well as increased automation to ease database administration tasks for smaller companies and new security features to protect against insider data theft.

Oracle released a Beta 1 version of the software in September, said Ari Kaplan, president of the Chicago-based International Oracle Users Group. For now, the planned upgrade is mostly being referred to by users as 11g, hewing to the naming convention that Oracle used when it released its current 10g database in 2004.

Kaplan, a senior consultant at Datalink Corp. in Chanhassen, Minn., who said he has seen the 11g beta, declined to disclose specific information about its contents. But he said the beta includes new features related to Oracle's Real Application Clusters technology, its grid management and XML handling capabilities, service-oriented architectures, security and the company's PL/SQL development language. "There's a lot of exciting functionality," Kaplan said.

Unlike Microsoft Corp., which went five years between database releases before shipping SQL Server 2005 last fall, Oracle doesn't look like it will have trouble meeting its usual three-year development cycle on new database releases, said Donald Burleson, an Oracle technology consultant and author in Kittrell, N.C. He expects the upgrade to be released sometime next year.

But Burleson was less wowed by the plans for 11g than Kaplan was. He described the next release as "a minor move up," with its most salient features from the user standpoint likely to be in the area of simplifying database administration tasks. "They're trying to make Oracle so simple a 12-year-old girl could install it," Burleson said.