The payment clearing house, which supports the and the Single Euro Payment Area, uses Oracle 11g release 1 as its database, and beta tested the second release that was at the start of September.

"It's critical for us to have 24/7 uptime, and speed is vital -- we have strict service level agreements," said Martin McGeough, technical architect at the company.

In an interview at a customer event for the second release of Oracle 11g, he added: "We've got big plans to use the online application change functionality, so we can update systems quickly and transparently."

Another speed feature that may be used by VocaLink as it adopts the full second release is 'intelligent' data management. This aims to boost performance by putting rarely used data on disks' inner rings, while information needed more often is stored on the outer rings.

McGeough also favoured the Real Application Clusters (RAC) in the software. RACs allow database workloads to be deployed across a pool of commodity hardware, meaning if any servers fail the others can pick up the slack.