The new release, touted to bring better information delivery through the enterprise, includes the Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) functionality which delivers grid plug and play and new server pooling capabilities that enable organizations to reduce their server costs by streamlining the provisioning and management of consolidated database grids.

The IT vendor said the new release is coupled with an advanced compression and partitioning support, which could help compress data by twice to four times as much, lowering storage costs in the process.

"Our customers want features that offer better performance and availability, lower IT costs and ways to deliver better information to their business users," said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle. "The availability of Release 2 completes the vision of Oracle Database 11g to address today's business and IT challenges."

Oracle said the new release can deliver up to ten times faster query performance when coupled with the Oracle Database Machine, and also includes the capability to transparently execute a query against data stored in memory across all the servers in a grid.

"As organizations face exponential information growth and complexity throughout the data center, they are seeking to minimize IT costs and increase administrative efficiencies," said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, IDC. "Oracle Database 11g Release 2 features enhancements to grid computing, storage management and administration capabilities that are designed to help users achieve greater resource utilization of their information management systems while making the related system infrastructure and storage easier to manage and more affordable."