Today Oracle announced the latest upgrade to its flagship database: 11g. The announcement brooks great interest within the ECM community because, as we detail in the ECM Suites Report, so many ECM tools (including all the leading players) utilize the Oracle database.

Of particular interest is enhanced support for "LOBs" (Large Objects), such as documents, drawings, images, and so forth. Oracle says 11g can now provide:

• comparable performance to regular file servers for access to large files
• greater compression capabilities
• the ability to encrypt LOBs within the database environment

It has long been the case that databases were ineffective at handling enterprise documents -- sometimes becoming grindingly slow -- but the performance gap has been closing over the past few years.

Of course, we've heard this story before -- that Oracle's latest database was going to obviate the need for a file system -- and the lack of traction for Oracle's own ECM products (developed in-house before Oracle acquired Stellent) suggests that to date, the market wasn't buying the story.

Nevertheless, given their druthers, many large enterprises would not make expensive file servers and proprietary repositories (long the backbone of DM and ECM systems) their first choice for managing ECM-related files. Surely IBM and Microsoft will respond with their own capabilities in this highly competitive database market.