Oracle’s latest release says the company has extended support for its key database feature, Real Application Testing. The company says the enhancement should help companies switch to the latest version of its database, Oracle 11g, although, the feature is available in the earlier versions of Oracle database (10g and 9i Release 2) as well.

“The challenge every IT organization has — be it upgrading an operating system, a database, moving from single server to clustered or from non-partitioned to partitioned — is how do you rigorously test those changes you made,” said Willie Hardie, vice president of database product marketing for Oracle.

Oracle with its 230,000 database customers seems to be making an effort to please all of them by providing them with this feature. What’s more, Oracle is addressing some major issues by releasing 45 security fixes as part of its coming Critical Patch pdate.

Crisis might have done harm to some parts of the industry, but definitely not to the relational database management systems market, which saw a 12.6 percent growth spike in 2007 to US$18.8 billion compared to $16.7 billion in 2006, according to IDC.

Oracle Corporation is leading with 44.3 % of the market and a revenue growth of 13.3 percent.

This is a lot due to the release of their 11g, with a large majority of ursers upgrading to it in the recent year. This and their Real Application Clusters is what really contributed to the company’s continued growth throughout the year.