Oracle Beats But Warns

Oracle delivered solid results after the close on Tuesday, but the company’s forward guidance was a little less robust than analysts were looking for.

Oracle beat Wall Street estimates by a penny with earnings of 10 cents a share, driven by strong database sales. Revenues of $2.21 billion were a little lighter than estimates, but new license sales — an important barometer of future growth — came in better than expected at $563 million.

“Since we introduced our database for grid computing, Oracle 10g, our database new license sales have grown 16%, 15% and 19% in the last three quarters, respectively,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in a statement. “Database grids mark a new generation of much faster and more reliable database technology that runs on groups of low-cost PC servers. Oracle is first to market with database grid technology and our database sales are trending up.”

The company said it expects November quarter revenues of $2.58-2.66 billion, at the low end of analysts’ estimates.

Still, after months of disappointing results from technology companies, Oracle’s results were good enough for a 3% gain after hours.

Also after the close, Xilinx warned.

The market was up slightly during the day, as oil and natural gas prices continued to rise as Hurricane Ivan approached the Gulf of Mexico. OPEC helped out with reports of higher output.

The Nasdaq rose 5 to 1915, the S&P 500 added 2 to 1128, and the Dow climbed 3 to 10,318. Volume declined to 1.2 billion shares on the NYSE, and 1.53 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led 17-16 on the NYSE, and 16-14 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 53% on the NYSE, and 55% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 105-14 on the NYSE, and 75-26 on the Nasdaq.

Yahoo rose 4% on a digital music acquisition.

Amazon surged 7% on reports of strong online sales.

LSI Logic tumbled 10% on a warning.

SupportSoft fell 11% on a downgrade.

QLogic climbed 3% on a deal with IBM .

CheckFree and eResearch rose on contract wins.