The Oracle OpenWorld 2012 event officially kicked off yesterday and will run through the 4th of October in San Francisco.

CEO Larry Ellison kicked things off with the introduction of the latest version of its 12c database software.  Oracle aims to be the ultimate cloud service as the new version launches on the three tiers of cloud: software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).  They plan on launching the service in the fastest computers in the world.

“We’re adding a new line of business, cloud computing, to our traditional business of selling software and selling hardware… and we’re going to sell it on the fastest computers in the world,” Ellison said on Sunday. “It makes a lot of sense for Oracle to be in all three tiers of cloud services.”

“The infrastructure that we’re offering isn’t conventional infrastructure.  What we’re offering is our OS, our VM, compute services and storage services on the fastest, most reliable machines in the world — on our engineered systems — all networked together with a modern Infiniband network.”

But aside from Ellison’s vision of the cloud, Oracle also announced the availability of the Release Candidate for MySQL 5.6, their popular open-source database.  It features increased performance, scalability, reliability and manageability, which will help users meet the most demanding Web, Cloud-based and embedded application requirements.

“The evolution of Web applications and Cloud adoption has introduced new performance, scalability and reliability challenges for IT,” said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering,Oracle. “New features in the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate help address these challenges and deliver a wide array of innovations to the MySQL community.”

Oracle also released the first Development Milestone Release (DMR) of MySQL Cluster 7.3, a version of the database for running a database across multiple servers.  And they’ve updated the MySQL Enterprise package for commercial clients with two new extensions.  It now provides the ability to provide reports for auditing and compliance plus it offers policy-based monitoring and logging of all actions on a database.  As for the second extension, it provides high availability (HA) safeguards, including automatic failover and replication.