Oracle Corp. is rolling out the latest iteration of its Database 10g software, which boosts self management capabilities and builds on the company"s grid computing initiative.

Database 10g Release 2 (R2) will offer Oracle"s Automatic Storage Management (ASM) tool, which can now handle multiple disk operations. Further performance enhancements will allow administrators to more quickly archive, move and copy large data sets through the grid infrastructure.

For better automation of administration, R2 will be able to collect statistics directly from memory, eliminating the need to run a SQL query to do so. And administrators will be able to automatically conduct database workload repository comparisons to get detailed information about workload changes and determine performance impact.

Looking to boost support for Windows, Oracle will offer tighter integration with Visual Studio and the .Net Common Language Runtime (CLR) procedures, enabling code written in one language to be executed by the CLR engine. For data protection, the application will come with row- and column-level security, as well as embedded data encryption and key management.

Oracle plans to start shipping R2 on the Linux platform first, with releases for other platforms becoming available through the summer.