Determined to stand tall on its database legs, Oracle walks into its AppsWorld conference this week in San Diego carrying a kit bag of troubles weighted with sluggish sales of its 11i E-Business Suite.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been causing quite a splash in the database world, particularly in the last few weeks, and IBM Corp. is the latest vendor to detail plans for the standard.
In its research labs, IBM is working on a project, code-named Xperanto, which will be a native XML database that acts as a subset of DB2, the company announced.
Database vendors are preparing for battle once again. This time around, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are brandishing XML as the not-so secret weapon for making their databases faster and using it to anchor Web services.