Oracle 10i database news reports that Oracle 10G will drop support for the rule based optimizer finally! Also the Oracle versions 8i and 9i release 1 shall exit error correction support after 31st December 2003 (which means no patches for bugs anymore hopefully).

Tim points me to Oracle's statement of direction were Oracle plans that both documentation and a version of PHP will be included in the release CDs of Oracle Application Server 10G (10.0.3). In addition, integration with Install, DCM and other core Oracle iAS facilities is planned. Further integration with Single Sign On and other core Oracle iAS facilities is being considered for this and future Oracle iAS releases."

This session lists some of the cool SQL features like

• the new native floating-point datatype based on IEEE 754 in Oracle Database 10g dramatically improving performance of floating-point processing common in XML and Java standards while substantially reducing storage space
• improved performance of LOB datatypes throughout the stack (SQL layer and its APIs).
• native, regular expression support to SQL in Oracle Database 10g revolutionizes the ability to search for and manipulate text within the database