Oracle updates enterprise blockchain platform
Oracle's enterprise blockchain has been updated to include more capabilities to enhance development, integration, and deployment of customers' new blockchain applications.
Oracle Blockchain Platform allows businesses to streamline blockchain application development and connect them to relevant business processes.
"The number of customers already running blockchain applications based on Oracle's blockchain platform is testament to the strength of the technology and the value it brings to a broad range of industries," comments Oracle's group vice president of Blockchain Product Development, Frank Xiong.
The Oracle Blockchain Platform has already attracted customers including China Distance Education Holdings, SERES, and ICS Financial Systems.
"Blockchain improves the trust relationship between franchisor and the franchises by including best practices and decentralized access to the transactions," explains SERES transactional services manager José María Mínguez Gutiérrez.
"Normally, merchandise acceptance processes are manual and require an operator entering the data into the system. But, for example when a franchise has economic problems, it can repudiate that delivery, saying that it never received the merchandise. They can manipulate the database and, on the other hand, also the franchisor can manipulate it.
"With blockchain and its immutability and traceability of information, all these problems disappear and all parties can trust the data and the transactions.
Oracle's latest updates to the Oracle Blockchain Platform includes developer-oriented productivity enhancements and consortium-oriented identity management features.
Oracle says these features are critical to a range of organisations that conduct business transactions through a blockchain network.
"Additionally, as blockchain becomes an important data store in the enterprise, the platform enables Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse customers to transparently capture blockchain transaction history and current state data for analytics and to integrate it with other data sources.
Features include:
• Enhanced world state database to support standard SQL-based ledger queries reducing the complexity of developing chaincode using readily available programming skills, ensure smart contracts can safely rely on the query results, which are verified at transaction commit, and significantly boost performance of rich data queries.
• Rich history database shadows transaction history into a relational database schema in the Autonomous Data Warehouse or other Oracle databases, which transparently enables analytics integration for interactive dashboards and reports.
• Enhanced REST APIs for event subscription, blockchain administration/configuration, and monitoring of network health, transaction rates, and other statistics, which simplify integration with existing enterprise IT tools.
• Identity federation further extends authentication capabilities to work with external identity providers to facilitate consortium blockchains with many diverse participants using their existing identity management systems.
• Third-party certificate support for registering client organizations on the blockchain network to enable them to use existing certificates issued by trusted third parties.
• Hyperledger Fabric 1.3 support, which adds many new features based on the evolving open source version, including chaincode development in Java, further leveraging existing enterprise skills, and support for private transactions among a subset of members, preserving privacy and business confidentiality. Oracle says it is committed to staying current with the Hyperledger community by leveraging new releases and contributing to the open source community.
