In this week’s Computer Weekly, we look at the IT challenges facing retailers, as consumers turn increasingly to web and mobile shopping channels. Oracle president Mark Hurd talks about how the supplier intends to simplify IT infrastructures. And new government CIO Andy Nelson discusses how he plans to transform Whitehall IT. Read the issue now. 

<p>This technical white paper provides Exadata Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) insight for rapid deployment and efficient operation of Exadata Database Machine, focusing on the areas of: Exadata MAA Architecture, initial deployment, post-deployment Exadata MAA configuration, and Exadata MAA operational best practices.</p> 

Applied Oracle Security (Oracle Press, 2010) is the definitive guide to safeguarding Oracle Database 11g written by the security experts in Oracle’s National Security Group. This complementary chapter on auditing covers how to audit database activity efficiently, improve security, address regulatory requirements, and automate compliance reporting. 

By using the Oracle Exadata Database Machine as a data warehouse platform you have a balanced, high performance hardware configuration. This paper focuses on the other two corner stones, data modeling and data loading, providing a set of best practices and examples for deploying a data warehouse on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. 

This paper shows the value of combining Oracle software with Intel Xeon processors on Dell PowerEdge servers. It begins with an overview of the collaboration that created these synergies, before detailing the major areas where they are manifest to end-customers: intelligent performance, automated energy efficiency, and flexible virtualization. 

This white paper provides an overview of Oracle's capabilities for data warehousing, and discusses the key features and technologies by which Oracle-based business intelligence and data warehouse systems easily integrate information, perform fast queries, scale to very large data volumes and analyze any data. 

This paper examines the application grid approach to enterprise middleware, and looks at Oracle Fusion Middleware products, including Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Coherence, and their ability to drastically reduce data center sprawl and drive down operational costs by instituting an application grid methodology. 

This paper provides recommended best practices to implement Dell EqualLogic storage replication as an Oracle DR solution.  Read now to learn more. 

One of the biggest dangers in establishing best practices for your contact center is to do so in isolation from your self-service stakeholders. Instead, all customer "touch-points" must be viewed as part of a continuum. Customer touch points include Web Self-Service, Interactive Voice Response, Contact Center Agents, and Face-to-Face transactions. 

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle now provides Oracle Optimized Solutions: a complete applications to disk solution engineered, tested, and certified to work together as a single system. Read this white paper to learn more about Oracle Optimized Solutions and how they can be used to improve Oracle E-Business Suite operations. 

Download the Oracle CRM White Paper, "Winning in Today's Environment: Six Imperatives for the Chief Sales Officer," to learn how you can deploy several best practices to achieve unparalleled sales success in your organization. 

This document focuses on key Oracle Database 11g capabilities that help IT departments better optimize their storage infrastructure, enabling administrators to deliver a cost effective, scalable information management platform that is easy to manage, and that continues to deliver the performance and availability that today's businesses require.