Dear Symyx Customer:

In September of 2004, Symyx initially announced support for many of our products with Oracle Database 9i Revision 2 Standard Edition (9.2.0.4). Since that time newer versions of Oracle Database 9i and 10g have become available, as well as the Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One option. This bulletin provides updated information about Elsevier MDL’s support of our products with the various Oracle Database editions.

In deciding whether to use the Enterprise, Standard Edition, or Standard Edition One of Oracle as your relational database, Symyx strongly recommends that your Oracle DBA review the Oracle 9i Database Release 2 Product Family white paper or the Oracle 10g Database Product Family white paper available on the Oracle web site. These documents provide a feature by feature comparison of the various Oracle editions and will enable you to determine which edition of Oracle is most appropriate for your business needs.

Oracle Enterprise Edition supports features listed below that are known to be in use within the Symyx customer base and are not supported with either Oracle Standard Edition or Oracle Standard Edition One:

• Fine Grained Access Control (row level security and Oracle Label security)
  
• Oracle Advanced Replication (Multi-Master replication)
  
• Bitmap indexes and bitmap join indexes
  
• Oracle Connection Manager
  
  

• Oracle Standard Edition may be used with up to 4 processors while Oracle Standard Edition One is limited to use on two-processor servers.
  
  
• Standard Edition supports Real Application Clusters, Integrated Clusterware, and Automatic Workload Management while Standard Edition One does not support these features.
  

• ISIS/Host 5.0 *see Notes below
  
• Symyx Direct 5.0 (molecules and reactions) *see Notes below
  
• Core Interface 1.1
  
• Plate Manager 2.0 SP1
  
• Assay Explorer 2.2 SP1
  
• Central Library 5.0 *see notes below
  
• Chemscape 1.7 SP1
  
• ChemBio AE 2.1 SP1
  
• Cheshire (CBRM) 3.0 SP1
  
• SMART 1.6 SP2
  
  

• Please refer to the Symyx Product Support Guidelines document, available on www.mdl.com, for a complete explanation of Symyx’s policy of supporting our products on future Oracle releases.
  
  
• Supported versions of Oracle: When Symyx releases a product, support is specifically stated for certain versions of Oracle. Any subsequent minor update to that major Oracle version would automatically be supported for that product by MDL.

• For example: Symyx Product A is released and support is stated for Oracle 9.2.0.6. Subsequent to that, Oracle releases both Oracle 9.2.0.7 and 10.1.0.2. Symyx Product A would be supported with Oracle 9.2.0.7 as this is a minor update for the supported major Oracle release (9.2.0.x). In this example, Symyx Product A would not automatically be supported on Oracle 10.1.0.2 as this is a major new release of Oracle.
  
  
  When we become aware of changes in minor releases that affect our software, we notify our customers via Technical Note about any issues and workarounds.

• Symyx’s support of Oracle Database Standard and Enterprise Editions is dependent on Oracle’s continued support of its product’s features as used by Symyx products.
  
  
• The behavior of the Oracle Number data type changed with Oracle version 9.2.0.3. This change in behavior along with configuration guidelines to revert to the behavior found in prior Oracle versions is discussed in Symyx Technical Note T41-2003. Further explanation of this issue may also be found on Oracle MetaLink.