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Oracle Database Management Strategic Directions
This blog will focus on Database Management Topics such as:
1. Enterprise Infrastructure Management across Multiple Tiers.
2. Oracle Fusion Middleware (J2EE, ADF, XML, BPEL, SOA, Web Services, ...).
3. Multi-Database management of Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL, ...
4. Oracle Database Server (11g, RAC, Streams, Data Guard, RMAN, ...).
5. Application Servers (Oracle, JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic).
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Thursday, May 14, 2009
DBAs have used vendor solutions for backups for years.
- In the Oracle world RMAN has been the primary tool used for Oracle backups.
- In the MySQL world replication, InnoDB hot backup have been primary tools used for backups.
However as databases grow into the two terabyte range and larger, the old ways are just not efficient any longer. In the future you will see snapshots and split mirror backups become more prominent in large database enviroments.
Snapshots and split mirror backups offered by logical volume managers and some operating systems allow a backup to be taken in a few seconds. Higher availability requirements and time windows required to perform backups are becoming bigger issues as database servers continue to grow in size.
Labels: Best Practices
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
The DBA Skills Gap In going to different companies every month I am consistently seeing a DBA skills gap in the peripheral areas of being a DBA. In the old days, a DBA that understood the operating system, networking and the development environment was a pretty complete DBA. Especially since in the old days, DBAs came from the development ranks and could support developers. In today's complex database environments, there is a definite skills gap in DBAs understanding the environments around databases. DBAs don't need to be experts in these areas, but should at least be comfortable in some of the areas surrounding databases: - Operating system.
- Basic networking knowledge.
- Storage management.
- RAID levels.
- Striping and mirroring concepts.
- Middle-tier fundamentals (Application Servers, connection pooling, caching, connection best practices from Java, .NET, PHP, etc).
- J2EE environments (Web Services, WSDL, SOA, BPEL, ...).
- XML.
DBAs with peripheral skills in some of these areas are worth their weight in gold. With the complexity of database management it is getting harder and harder for new DBAs to have strong DBA skills and peripheral skills of the environment surrounding the database. Labels: Oracle DBA
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Complexity of Database Environments
Database vendors are putting in tremendous effort to reduce the complexity of database environments. However in the world of multi-tiered architectures, application servers, web technologies, storage, clustering, virtualization, Grid management, EPM, MDM as well as the constant growth in databases and performance challenges their is going to be complexity. So DBAs are going to need to constantly upgrade their skills to be ready for all the challenges surrounding database environments.
IOUG Collaborate 09 Conference Whitepapers and Podcasts
One of the ways of keeping an Oracle DBA and Developer's skills up is to attend user conferences. The whitepapers and podcasts from the IOUG Collaborate 09 conference are one way to keep up to speed on what the top Oracle user community leaders are saying. I have been reading a number of excellent whitepapers and podcasts. Below are some of the categories of whitepapers from the IOUG conference.
- Technology Directions
- Connectivity
- Governance and Corporate Compliance
- Application Express
- Service Oriented Architecture
- 11g Features
- Performance Database Tuning
- Database Programming
- Security
- Tools Evaluation
- Frameworks
- Testing/Quality Assurance
- Best Practices
- Web Development
- Crossover Topics for App Server Administrators
- Industry Best Practices
- Case Studies
- Design/Configuration
- Enterprise Integration
As a database professional make sure you are finding ways to keep your skills up. :) Labels: Collaborate 09
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
It is always important to make sure you are maintaining your skill set and marketability as an Oracle professional. In a down economy it is even more so for a DBA. So my question to you is , do you try to scale vertically or horizontally? Scaling vertically, is picking a specific area like RAC or BI and trying to maximize your expertise in that one area. If you scale horizontally you are trying to maintain expertise in a number of areas. I have focused on scaling horizontally, so I can manage HA across all tiers of an Oracle infrastructure. This has involved three key areas: - Infrastructure Management: Oracle Enterprise Manager (Grid Control)
- Database Server High Availability: Oracle RAC, Data Guard, Streams, Disaster Recovery, Performance and Backup/Recovery
- Middle-tier Management: Oracle Fusion Middleware (J2EE, Web Services, BPEL, SOA, XML, Oracle Business Rules)
Maximizing your expertise is very important these days. The traditional DBA that just knows basic administration, performance tuning and backup/recovery is the lowest common denominator and the easiest person to outsource. Here are ten areas you may want to consider for increasing your expertise and marketability as a DBA: - Managing infrastructures with Oracle Enterprise Manager (Grid Control)
- High Availability (RAC, Data Guard, Streams)
- Virtualization
- Oracle Fusion Middleware
- Oracle Applications DBA (EBS, PeopleSoft, JDEdwards, Siebel, Oracle Fusion, ...)
- Oracle EPM
- Oracle Essbase and EPM
- Oracle Security
- Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
- Oracle Application Server and Portal
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Maintaining and Improving Your Technical ExpertiseThe complexity of Oracle environments and the strategic importance of Oracle databases require the Oracle DBAs constantly improve their skill sets to remain marketable. What are you doing today to maintain your expertise and your marketability in this ever increasing competitive IT market? Upcoming Skill Sets that are Increasing in ImportanceAt customer sites I see the following skill sets increasing in importance (in no particular order): - Virtualization.
- Storage management (ASM and Clustering).
- Oracle Application DBAs.
- Oracle Fusion Middleware (Java, Web Services, XML, SOA, BPEL, SOAP, WSDL, ...).
- Business Intelligence
Labels: Oracle Future Trends and Directions
Friday, April 17, 2009
 The Collaborate 09 Users Conference is going to be a conference with an excellent ROI. Some of the key areas I will be looking at include: - DBA best practices tips and tricks.
- Latest techniques in RAC, Data Guard, Streams and OEM.
- Performance tuning, performance tuning, performance tuning.
- Oracle Automatic Storage Management is a key upcoming skill for Oracle DBAs.
- Updates on Oracle Fusion Middleware technology and intergration with BEA.
- Oracle DBAs with applications knowledge will be in ever increasing demand. So attending some OAUG and Quest presentations will be good for the technical DBA.
- Looking at evolution of Oracle BI with Hyperion.
Collaborate is the key Oracle technical users conference of the year. I can't wait for the conference to begin. Labels: Collaborate 09
Thursday, April 09, 2009
The technology environments being used by startup companies is always important to understand. These environments show the next generation of where technology and business are going. After startup organizations maximize these technologies you then see these technologies grow into large organizations. In the last thirty years we have seen the importance of recognizing this. What's interesting yet not surprising is that patterns of change are occurring faster and faster. - 1980s - 2000 - During this time desktop computing, Unix, client/server, relational databases allowed small organizations to compete against the traditional big companies running IBM, DEC, Prime, Unisys who were the traditional technology powers in the 1960s and 1970s. (note: I wonder how may know even who DEC, Prime and Unisys are)
- 2000 - 2005 - During this time commodity hardware (x86), Linux, mid-range systems, clustering (growing systems horizontally instead of vertically) is where you seen tremendous growth.
- 2005 - Today - Open source has been the big growth area using Linux, MySQL, PHP, Apache to growth large scale web solutions.
- Today - - Cloud computing and Software As A Service (SAAS) have the potential to be the next big growth area.
Each of these technology shifts were first seen by startup organizations that needed to leverage the cost efficiency and effectiveness of new technology to compete against larger firms. It will be important to watch the emergence of open source, cloud computing and SAAS and the role they play in business growth and development. Labels: Cloud Computing, Technology trends
Friday, February 13, 2009
Right now a lot of professionals are not prepared to get a new job in today's economy. Their resume and approach to finding a job are totally wrong. The reason is they are using the same type of resume and approach to finding a job that they used in the .com boom days. That approach will not work today. It is very important for someone to make a major effort in their strategy for getting a new job. Here is a top ten list for finding a new IT job in today's economy. - Accomplishments: Make sure your resume focuses on accomplishments and things you have done to make companies successful. A resume showing you are a great DBA or Developer is not going to be enough. The competition is going to be too intense. You'll lose the numbers game. Your resume needs to show what you are going to do for a company and new boss. Accomplishments, accomplishments, accomplishments!
- What have you done lately: A company is not likely to care that you have tons of experience. What have you done in the last two years that separates you from all the other resumes. Focus on highly polishing your resume for the last two years, then last five years and then last ten years. In sports, your market value is going to be based on what you did last season, not ten seasons ago. It is the same in today's economic market.
- Go the extra mile: Properly research the organization, hiring department, hiring manager for the job you are interested in. A "To Whom It May Concern" cover letter is going to wind up in the trash.
- What makes you special: If you are applying for a job, it is likely 300 - 1000 other people are also. How is your resume going to get on the stack to get an interview. Your resume and cover letter has to get you the interview. Focus on that. Your interview will then focus on getting the job.
- First impression is everything: Your cover letter is more important than your resume. If your cover letter is not good enough, your resume will never get read. Make your cover letter stand out.
- Win the numbers game: You are going to be competing against hundreds of people looking for a job. Just having experience and being good at what you do is not going to be enough. There are also likely people interviewing for the position that have the inside track due to networking or people that they know. What's going to impress someone enough about you that makes you a candidate they have to look at?
- The 30 second resume: If someone is looking at hundreds of resumes they are not likely to spend more than 30 - 60 seconds looking at a resume. Your resume needs to be able to make the 30 second cut.
- Prepare: Proper preparation prevents pitiful performance. You just got an interview. You've done a great job being one of the few candidates that gets an interview. Now you have to get the job. You'd better have prepared your questions, your answers and everything you do in that interview. Someone within 15 seconds will have a feeling if they are interested in you or not. Go to the library, get on the internet, talk to friends, but you'd better be ready to completely ace an interview.
- Get better: While you are going through the interview process keep improving your skills. Make yourself more attractive to an interviewer. Are there additional skills you can be working on? Are there skills you can add more depth to?
- Life is not fair: Don't expect life to be fair. In this politically correct world we pretend people are not prejudice, are nice and will treat everyone fairly. That could not be further from the truth. Prepare yourself to win the game in an unfair world. Be the best candidate so the organization sees that you "are the one" that they have to hire.
Whatever you do, don't despair, give up or get down. Make yourself better and stronger during this process. Read books on networking. Call friends, peers, get out there. Get more involved in church, local groups, charity events, etc. to get out in front of people. Also find ways to deal with the stress. Whether it is exercise, starting a new hobby, whatever. But you have to be ready when you get the interview. And last, work your rear end off! The harder you work the luckier you will get. And most of all, good luck! :) Labels: finding a job, Getting a job, Job Tips, winning the interview game
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Today was an excellent wrap up to RMOUG training days. A summary of highlights: - For RMOUG being a local users group event, there were a large number of top Oracle presenters who flew in for the conference.
- A large number of excellent performance tuning presentations. Performance tuning was a major focus.
- The networking and interaction of the attendees was as good as I've seen at a conference in years.
- I would put the quality of all of the presentations be extremely high for the conference.
- There were no marketing presentations. Excellent focus on technical presentations with high ROI for attendees.
An observation: Oracle10gR2 has been out a long time (2005) and there has been a slow adoption rate of Oracle Database Server 11gR1. So as we start the new year, I wanted to see how have skills and tools of DBAs have evolved in the last few years and what is changing around DBAs. A few thoughts about DBAs between 2005 and 20010: - DBAs have gotten very, very good with core skills such as performance tuning, backup/recovery, ASM, RAC, partitioning, OEM, etc. So if you are a DBA you'd better have some very serious skills to compete as a senior DBA.
- DBAs are adding lots of scripts, tricks and techniques to managing Oracle database servers.
- I was surprised to see the large number of DBAs are still interested in basic DBA skills and knowledge.
- Still a small percentage of DBAs that are really good with Streams, Data Guard, XML, etc.
- A lot of DBAs are not using OEM features in 10g to manage their database servers due to licensing of management packs.
- DBAs are not migrating to managing the middle tier. For the most part DBAs are staying to the database server. There are more developers migrating to managing the middle tier, similar to how the traditional developers migrated to be come DBAs.
- There is still a long way to go to develop people's skills in Oracle Fusion Middleware (J2EE, Web Services, XML, BPEL, SOA, etc). Most people I talked to at the conference still do not even understand what Oracle Fusion Middleware is. If you ask attendees what is Oracle Fusion Middleware or why is it important, I'd bet 9 out of 10 could not answer these questions.
Overall a great success for the conference. Way to go RMOUG! Now on to IOUG Collaborate 2009 in Orlando, FL starting May 3rd 2009! Labels: RMOUG 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
My Highlights of Day One at RMOUG 2009 Training Days: - As always RMOUG is a very well run conference and the volunteers and RMOUG team are outstanding.
- Congratulations to Peggy King for a RMOUG Lifetime Achievement Award! Very well deserved.
- Tom Kyte: Went to a presentation by Tom Kyte I was very familiar with, but his presentation style, techniques and demos always make it a pleasure to attend one of his presentations.
- Debra Lilley: Excellent presentation on Fusion. It was great to have Debra deliver a detailed presentation on Oracle Fusion Middleware from the "applications" perspective. Debra has been a key leader in the Oracle Fusion Council for years and her insights and perspective on Oracle Fusion applications is invaluable.
- John VanSant: Outstanding presentation on Oracle WebLogic Application Server. This was an excellent presentation for me to attend. I've spent years trying to master the Oracle Application Server and in Oracle 11g Fusion Middleware, everything is moving over to the WebLogic Application Server. It was great to hear from one of the top Java architects, his perspective on the WebLogic application server.
A few take aways for me: - Despite working with Oracle Fusion Middleware for a few years, there is still a lot to learn as middleware technology and surrounding standards continue to evolve. The enhancements to JDeveloper and the integration of Oracle technology into the WebLogic Application Server keeps the Oracle Fusion Middleware a moving target for right now.
- I'm going to wait for the Oracle 11g WebLogic application server instead of investing heavily in Oracle WebLogic 10.3 skill development.
- The new features of Oracle Fusion Applications bring alot of incredible technology and new functionality into the next generation of Oracle business applications. The role of SOA will continue to grow in large organizations and Oracle technology is in the center of this next generation of business applications.
It was great running into so many friends at the conference. There is a lot of energy and enthusiasm at the conference. It was also excellent to get a pulse and perspective from the attendees. I heard a number of people mention presentations I was not able to attend that they really enjoyed. A great first day of the conference. Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle Training Days, RMOUG 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
As always there is a great list of upcoming conferences to look at for the upcoming year. On my wish list is: - RMOUG - Training Days - Denver, CO, February 10 - 12, 2009
- MySQL - MySQL Conference, Santa Clara, CA, April 20 - 23, 2009
- IOUG - Collaborate 2009, Orlando, FL, May 3 - 7, 2009
- JavaOne - JavaOne Conference, San Francisco, CA, June 2 - 5, 2009
- Oracle - Openworld 2009 - San Francisco, CA, October 11-15, 2009
I have not attended presentations at all the local user group conferences but the following is a list of users conferences I have attended that were excellent. - Houston Oracle Users Group
- Dallas Oracle Users Group
- Northern California Oracle Users Group
I can't recommend highly enough to get involved in your local technical user groups and start getting involved.
Monday, February 09, 2009
The Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group ( RMOUG) is one of the top local Oracle user groups in the country. Their training days are February 10 - 12, 2009 at the Colorado Convention Center. On February 10th there are all day University events where you can see some of the top presenters focus on a specific topic. Then on February 11 - 12, there are the 1-2 hour presentations delivered by some of the top presenters in the Oracle world. In today's economic climate it is more important than ever to maximize your networking, improve your technical skills and understand strategic directions. For technical DBAs, Developers, Application Server Administrators, Analysts, etc. technical user conferences are one of the best ways to achieve these goals. I can't recommend highly enough to attend the RMOUG conference if you can. This year I am taking a break from presenting at conferences due to the number of side projects I am working on. However, there is incredible value in these Oracle user conferences and I plan on attending as many as I can. I thought I would go ahead and publish the presentations I plan on attending. There is no rhyme or reason for this schedule. I try to balance listening to future directions, new tips, looking at upcoming speakers, or seeing what a specific presenter has to say on a topic.
Presentations I plan on attending at RMOUG (this is tentative and may change): Tuesday: February 10, 2009 Undecided on whether to attend University event. Wed: February 11, 2009 9:00 Encryption Tom Kyte 10:30 Partitioning Tim Gorman 1:30 Tuning Advisors Donald Burleson 2:15 Best Practices Iggy Fernandez 3:15 Fusion Hands On Lynn Munsinger 5:00 Websphere John Vansant 6:00 Reception Four Seasons Ballroom Thu: February 12, 2009 9:00 Execution Plans Charlie Callaway 10:15 Dev Workshop Cary Milsap 11:15 Execution Plans Tamal Poder 1:30 Connection Pools Michael Rosenbloom 2:45 Partitioning Hermann Baer 4:00 SOA for DBAs Brad Brown I hope to run into as many friends as possible during the conference and hopefully will make a few new friends before the conference is over. You should also take a look at the upcoming IOUG Collaborate conference May 3 - 7, 2009 in Orlando, FL. Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle User Conferences, RMOUG
Friday, January 16, 2009
This is the time of year to start looking at upcoming Oracle user conferences. Attending local user groups are also an excellent way to get some great training. Upcoming Oracle user conferences I strongly recommend include:
- Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group, February 11-12 2009, Denver, CO, USA
- Hotsos Symposium, March 8-12 2009, Dallas, TX, USA
- COLLABORATE '09' Conference, May 3-7 2009, Orlando, FL ,USA
- Kaleidoscope 2009 conference, June 21 - 25 2009, Monterey, CA, USA
Local user conferences that I have attended that have been excellent include: - Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group
- Dallas Oracle Users Group
- Northern California Oracle Users Group
- New York Oracle Users Group
- Houston Oracle Users Group
Friday, December 19, 2008
I'm always being asked the following questions; "How do I stay marketable?" or "What trends are occurring in technology that impact DBAs and Developers?". The trends are pretty obvious, the question is what conclusions do we draw from them. These trends can be found at http://mysql-dba-journey.blogspot.com . Labels: Technology trends
Monday, November 03, 2008
Coming back from the Oracle Open World conference, a lot of energy was around the Oracle middleware solutions and SOA. So I found the recent projections from Gartner that SOA growth projections are shrinking. The article says the number of companies looking at going to SOA is dropping dramatically since the beginning of 2008. In this article, "Gartner also said the number of organizations already pursuing SOA shows a massive change in the future perception of SOA, from something that is essentially inevitable for all organizations in a short time to a situation where many organizations evaluated SOA and have chosen not to spend time and effort on it."
A lack of SOA expertise and no true business we also stated as key reasons for the slowdown in SOA growth projections. I found it interesting that SOA adoption is highest in Europe, moderate in the United States and lowest in Asia. Oracle is completely committed to SOA and the middleware for the Oracle Fusion Middleware applications, so the activity surrounding SOA is not likely to change around Oracle environments. However, SOA activity outside of Oracle will be interesting to monitor for the next year.
Labels: SOA
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
We've all been waiting for the big announcement from Larry Ellison at Oracle Open World. This one is definitely going to shake things up a little bit. Here at the Moscone Center it's standing room only. Safra Catz CFO for Oracle introduced the keynote speakers. HP, Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group
By 2010 more than 1/3 of CEOs and CIOs say their current data center will be unable to meet growing needs. Their infrastructures are going to need to deal with Information explosion, CEOs demanding more from IT and an aging infrastructure of data centers.
They need to provide robust information to enable better business decisions. She said, HP blade servers have 50% of the blade server market. With the acquisition of EDS, HP is looking to manage more data centers for customers. She sees future data centers will have assets operating as a single virtual infrastructure. She showed a video of how data centers for HP have been evolving. They moved from 85 to 6 data centers. Highly emphasized blade servers. She sees virtualization as empowering deployments faster. She talked about PODs (performance-enhancing data centers) that can be built and shipped. They are portable. Want to use laser light beams instead of copper wire.
Oracle, Larry Ellison, CEO - Extreme Performance
Larry Ellison is here to talk about "Extreme Performance". Large data warehouses are doubling every few years. Current systems will not be able to handle the data bandwidth of future systems. "The Data Bandwidth Problem". Data warehouses start to slowdown at 10TB. Even the fastest disk storage systems start to fall apart at 10 TBs. Midrange storage arrays and NAS have trouble sooner. Multiple ways to solve the data bandwith problem. One way is to reduce the amount of data that needs to go from storage to database or increase the bandwidth.
Oracle is announcing Oracle's first hardware product, The Exadata Programmable Storage Server. They are partnering with HP on this. They are building intelligence into the storage to reduce data going through the pipes. It will pass query results back to database server not disk blocks. So instead of going through storage array and transferring all disk blocks to database server and database server filters out the disk blocks to generate a query result. The Exadata Storage Server. They pass the query to the storage arrays. Underlying ASM storage will perform parallel processing in the storage grid. This will take a lot of pressure off the bandwidth. Also will have wider pipes and more of them. They will have 2 Infiniband pipes. The Infiniband pipes are actually faster than the disk storage.
- 2 Intel processors: 8 cores
- 12 Disk Drives, up to 12 TB raw storage
- Oralce Enterprise Linux OS
- Oracle Parallel Query database software
The HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server Grid is available with Linux today. Other systems coming. Believe in scaling horizontally:
- Exadata Storage Grid
- Oracle Database Grid
- Fusion Middleware Grid
The Oracle HP Database Machine is the second database announcement, its all packaged for you:
- 8 Oracle database servers
- 64 Intel processsor cores
- Oracle Enterprise Linux
- Oracle Real Application Clusters
- 14 Exadata Storage Servers
- 14GB/sec data bandwidth
- 112 Intel Processor Cores
- 1000 GB disk drives
Current testing has shown 10 times to 72 times faster than current systems. He said Oracle mirrored Oracle's Primary Financial Data Warehouse and ran it on the Exadata Storage Server Grid and it ran 30 times faster. Larry compared the Oracle Database Machine and showed how they believe this new Oracle hardware is much faster than Teradata and Netezza. He believes Oracle now has a major architectural advantage. He said the delivery model is HP for systems delivery and hardware service and Oracle will provide sales and system support.
A good friend of mine looked at the pricing model for this solution and I heard numbers from 2 - 5 million dollars. So make sure you bring your checkbook for this. This I need to look at in more deail.
My understanding is that HP has exclusivity with Oracle for six months and then other companies can start working with Oracle using this technolog. Not sure about this, I have to look at it in more detail.
Labels: Evaluation of Enterprise Linux for Oracle, Exabyte Database Server, George Trujillo, Larry Ellison
Monday, September 22, 2008
Changing Role of the DBA The role of the Oracle DBA is continuing to evolve. If you look at the Oracle Open World conference anybody that is looking can see this change. The fundamental skills of the "traditional" DBA that knew administration, performance tuning and backup and recovery is not going to be enough for an Oracle DBA to stay highly marketable in the future. Another bad thing about having just the traditional skills is that those skills are the easiest to offshore.
Steve Lemme has been one of the leaders in the Oracle community discussing the evolving role of the DBA and how automation is going to also change the role of a DBA. Here is one link to look at: http::/eyeonoracle.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/04/16/can-oracle-dbas-survive-automation/#comment-12549
Increasing your marketability as an Oracle DBA So I'm always being asked what areas should a DBA be looking at. I then answer with "it depends". To be successful in any area, you have to have a passion for what you are working on. So I'm going to give my perspective on areas to be looking at if you want to stay marketable, and increase your salary. - I love what I do and I want to keep doing it! "The Technical Track" - Oracle environments are getting more and more complex. Specializing in Oracle RAC, Data Guard, Streams, OEM and managing VLDBs is an area that is continuing to increase. These additional areas are not anything special. More and more companies are going to require DBAs have skills in some of these areas.
- Show me the money! "The Money Track" - There is going to be an every increasing demand for DBAs that understand areas like Essbase, BI, OLAP, Hyperion, Stellant. Specializing in these areas is going to return you to the golden days of the dot com period. When DBA bill rates were very high and top DBAs could tell companies the salary they wanted.
- Give me Fusion or give me death. "Fusion Track" - When Oracle Fusion Applications start to gain momentum there is going to be an enormous demand for DBAs that can support Oracle applications as well as DBAs that can manage multiple tiers of an Oracle infrastructure that includes the middle-tier.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Definitely take a look at Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) SIG Sunday September 21, 2008 during Oracle Open World 2008 in San Francisco. The IOUG SIG day is going to contain technical presentations by recognized industry leaders in topics ranging from the database server, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Business Intelligence. Labels: Oracle Open World
While attending Oracle Open World (OOW) September 21 - 25 2008 attending presentations related to the BEA Integration into Oracle Fusion Middleware are going to be popular presentations. Two Oracle booths in the Oracle Campgrounds I would definitely recommend visiting include: - Oracle WebLogic Server
- Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE)
The Oracle WebLogic Server is going to be the key engine that runs Oracle Fusion applications. OEPE takes the most popular middleware development tool and provides Oracle WebLogic Server plug-ins for Eclipse 3.3 and 3.4. Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle Open World
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
BEA Welcome and Oracle's Middleware Strategic Briefing
I just finished listening to the BEA Welcome and Oracle's Middleware Strategic Briefing by Charles Phillips (President) and Thomas Kurian (Senior Vice President) at Oracle. As part of the user community, I heard a lot of good things in this presentation. Oracle is continuing to excel at integrating acquisitions into their strategic directions. The strategic roadmap for integrating BEA into Oracle Fusion Middleware looks like a win for Oracle and BEA customers. The entire presentation can be replayed using RealPlayer.
Overall, I was impressed with Thomas Kurian's details of the BEA integration into Oracle and how that impacts Oracle Fusion Middleware technology. Thomas Kurian emphasized: - Oracle's solution offers a unified solution make up of modular components.
- Key areas continue to be SOA, business intelligence, content management, Web 2.0 and process management.
- There is a clear well-defined strategy for Oracle and BEA products. This will increase customer choices for how to implement their middleware solutions.
- Oracle will continue to increase its investment in middleware technology.
- Oracle has a number of local events planned for BEA customers and partners.
Key Points in Briefing
The key points that stood out to me: - Oracle's Application Integration Architecture (AIA) is demonstrating that Oracle picked the right framework for integrating Oracle and standards based solutions into enterprise solutions. AIA is showing flexibility as Oracle technology evolves.
- The Oracle Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is still going to have JDeveloper as the key development tool but will also use an Oracle Eclipse Pack that will address all the BEA developers that have worked with Eclipse for years. This allows developers have have grown up with the Oracle JDeveloper tool and open source developers that use Eclipse to choose their IDE development tool of preference.
- Oracle ADF will continue to be a key strategic piece of developing web based applications.
- Oracle BPEL Process Manager will continue its key role in the SOA strategy.
- Oracle Business Rules and BAM are going to continue their strategic roles.
- BEA technology in areas where the BEA products or components excel, are going to be integrated into the Fusion Middleware modular components. Products like JRocket and parts of AquaLogic will strengthen Oracle Fusion Middleware in the future.
- In areas where there is overlap between Oracle and BEA products, there is going to be some merging of products. This is something that should surprise no one. Customers are going to have to address this transition area.
- BEA customers will be able to continue to use BEA products for existing support lifespans and no forced migration strategies are in place.
- BEA developer and technology groups will move into the OTN online community.
- SOA governance will include BEA AquaLogic Repository, Oracle Web Services Manager, EM SOA Management Pack, BEA AquaLogic Services Manager as key pieces.
- Enterprise Portals will use Oracle WebCenter, BEA WebLogic Portal, BEA Commerce Services, BEA Collabra, BEA Pathways and BEA Ensemble as key components.
- The Oracle Service Bus will integrate the Oracle ESB and BEA's service bus.
Summary
As the old saying goes, "the devil is in the details". However, the roadmap is clear and looks like a big win for Oracle and BEA customers. I liked knowing that my knowledge investment in areas such as Oracle ADF, BPEL, Oracle Business Rules and the Oracle Application Server continue to play a major role in Oracle Fusion Middleware. I also like knowing that leading edge components in BEA are going to integrate into the modular component design of Oracle Fusion Middleware. BEA technologists are going to have a larger transition.
Oracle Middleware expertise is going to continue to play a larger and larger role in the IT industry as Oracle Fusion applications start rolling out and as customers want to protect their current customizations to make sure they integrate into next generation business applications. Labels: Oracle Fusion Middleware
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The Oracle users conference called collaborate 2008 just wrapped up. This users conference is a collaboration of three key Oracle users groups:
- Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) is a users group supporting the technology side of Oracle.
- Oracle Application Users Group (OAUG) supports users working with Oracle Applications.
- Quest International Users Group (Quest) supports users working with PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Oracle Utilities and their complementary products and services.
This conference is the largest Oracle users conference in the world. It allows someone to attend tracks for a specific user group or to attend presentations from different users group. With my focus on the technology side, I usually attend presentations from the IOUG and then cherry pick key speakers and presentations from OAUG and Quest relating to Oracle Fusion Middleware. The OAUG and Quest both have a lot of presentations in the different Oracle application areas. All three user groups try very hard to minimize the marketing presentations and focus on presentations related to Oracle technology or functional areas of Oracle applications.
For me, I attended some excellent presentations on the database server from the IOUG and some excellent presentations on Oracle Fusion Middleware from all three groups.
This is an excellent conference to attend with outstanding presentations and tremendous networking opportunities.
Thanks again to all the outstanding volunteers who are the heart and soul of the conference from all three groups.
And special kudos to Executive Editor John Kanagaraj and the Contributing Editors of Select Magazine. Select magazine is voted every year as the number one member benefit of the IOUG. The incredible effort of the Select team results in an outstanding and high regarded product. Way to go John, Tony, Don, Paul, Arup, Andy and April!
Labels: Collaborate 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The Collaborate 2008 Oracle users conference is definitely charged with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Everybody seems to love the rooms at the Hyatt. Sunday - A great start with a lot of excellent university presentations. Monday - Fusion Infusion started with George Trujillo talking about the importance of Fusion Middleware to the user community. His presentation was followed by some excellent presentations by Fusion industry leaders such as Paul Dorsey, Peter Koletzke, Eric Marcioux, Basheer Khan and Duncan Mills. The words of wisdom and insights provided by these leaders was absolutely fantastic. Monday ended with a great networking party "Oracle Tuning" that had a lot of members playing the guitar, singing songs, doing karaoke, and dancing. A great evening was had by everyone. Tuesday - A lot of great presentations on Tuning, RAC and Fusion Middleware. The hands on Fusion development experience had to be the hit of the day. Wednesday - Some excellent presentations on XML DB and Fusion Middleware. A lot of the buzz on the street is on Stellant and Hyperion. Oracle seems to be putting a lot more emphasis on WebCenter. Expect a lot more on WebCenter in the next year. Wednesday is a big party. Everybody seems to really enjoy the networking that is occurring outside of the presentations.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
The one consistent part of the Oracle world is that it is constantly changing. How are you changing in this dynamic environment to make sure you stay marketable in the future. Here is a list of trends I see going on in the Oracle world. - VLDBs - Oracle databases are getting larger and larger. There is more complexity in managing very large databases running RAC, Data Guard, Streams. Storage and security are playing a larger role as well. People with strong skills sets in VLDBs are going to increase in demand.
- Oracle Fusion Middleware - This going to be a great area to expand in. People with skills in SOA, BPEL, BAM, ESB, Web Services, J2EE, ADF, JSF and XML are going to increase significantly in demand. The issue here is Oracle Fusion Applications are not rolling out yet. This demand is coming in the future. So there is time for you to get up to speed to take advantage of this future hot area.
- Application Server Administrators - People that can manage the middle tier are just as important as the Oracle DBAs. The Oracle Application Server, BEA, WebSphere are all complex applications that require a lot of skill to manage successfully.
- Application DBAs - People with DBA experience that can work with middleware developers and application server environments.
- Managing Complexity - People with strong skill sets in Grid Control or Quest and that can manage multiple tiers of an Oracle environment from the database server to the application server are going to increase in demand. DBAs that contribute more to the business versus heads down DBAs that just write scripts are needed more than ever.
- Hetergenous environments - DBAs that can manage multiple database platforms such as SQL Server, MySQL and DB2 are going to be in strong demand.
- Security - Security is playing a larger role every day. Experts in the area are going to be able to name their price.
- Open Source - The LAMP stack is playing a larger role. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP are having almost exponential growth.
There is a summary podcast at http://web.mac.com/george. Trujillo. At the site, click on Oracle Podcasts. Labels: Oracle, Oracle Future Trends and Directions
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The Oracle users conference, Collaborate 2008 is coming up. It's one of highest ROIs you can get for your Oracle training dollar. Just like anything else you do that is successful, plan on how you can maximize your attendance at a conference. If you don't attend conferences on a regular basis here are a few things you can do to maximize your experience:
- Volunteer! Best way to meet new people and feel a part of the conference.
- Join! There are often Special Interest Groups (SIGs) or other groups within a conference that try to bring people with common interests together.
- Introduce yourself! Try to meet as many people as you can at the conference. Challenge yourself to meet as many people as you can as possible. Ask them questions like: What's the best presentation you've attended so far? Are there any speakers you really like and would recommend to someone new to a conference attend? What area are you focusing on at the conference? A conference is the best way to work on your communication and networking skills. Buy a book on networking and try some of the techniques. If you are new to the conference no one knows you, what do you have to lose? Ask them about what environments they are running? What challenges are they having with their technology?
- Attend get togethers! Every conference has breakfast, unconference and birds of a feather meetings and other ways to network. If one doesn't work out, don't get discouraged. Remember you don't know anyone there how can you make a mistake.
- Business cards! Bring business cards and everyone you meet give them a business card. Who knows, someone might even give you there card. :)
- Prepare! Get organized. There are tons of great books, blogs, and Internet information on 10 ten tips for introducing yourself, networking and socializing. Try them.
- Submit! Submit a presentation. Awesome way to expand your comfort level and for people to get to know you. Most important thing people want at a conference is to learn from other people's experiences. You don't have to be a top expert. Do not underestimate what you have to say?
I consider myself a pretty social person. However, I remember when I first starting going to conferences it was pretty lonely. I wasn't comfortable walking up and talking to people. The first birds of a feather meeting I went to, I walked in the door, everybody looked up at me, I froze and I walked out. I realized I was too shy but was too embarrassed to walk back in. It can get really lonely if it seems everybody else knows each other.
Since then I have ran different areas of a conference, been on expert panels, given key note presentations and been on board of directors for conferences. All of these things occurred because I was willing to push myself past my comfort zone and began to submit papers for presenting and to join different groups at conferences.
Networking is always rated first or second in terms of benefits for people that attend conferences. If you would like to increase your networking skills I would recommend you read the book "Million Dollar Networking" by Andrea Nierenberg. This will give you a lot of great ideas, recommendations and things to say to greatly increase your networking skills. You are going to spend thousands of dollars to attend the conference, why not spend another $30 and maximize the networking you can do.
Everybody attending a conference has been in your shoes. Go introduce yourself to volunteers or speakers. Ask them about ways to maximize the time at the conference and what speakers they like to see. All volunteers I guarantee you want you to have fun and enjoy the conference and they know what its like to go to a conference for the first time. Most importantly, find out if any conference volunteers are around, they are some of the coolest, most enjoyable and high energetic people you'll find at the conference. :) Labels: Collaborate 08, IOUG
Monday, February 18, 2008
There have been significant trends and changes in the IT industry. Some of them include: * Main Frame systems * Client/Server * Distributed systems * Multi-tiered platforms with application servers * Open Source It's important to understand each of these is a technology to help meet business goals. Open source is currently an area of high growth and interest in the industry. The cost benefits provide organizations with a lot of flexibility in how they put their infrastructures together. Global markets and competition are putting even more pressure on IT organizations to make the right decisions.
I was talking to a friend about what organizations are doing with open source strategies. The result of the conversation ended with it is not about an open source strategy. It is more about developing the "right customer strategy" and if and how open source can play a role in helping a customer meet their business objectives and goals.
I've always felt as a DBA/manager, the more options I have the better decisions I can make. Including open source solutions in the decision process helps make sure customers are looking at their overall strategy in addressing challenges they are facing. No one technology solution is the best solution for every problem that exists. Oracle Enterprise Edition, Oracle Standard Edition, Oracle Express, MySQL, Oracle Application Server, Apache, JBoss, BEA, Eclipse, JDeveloper, Linux, PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc. all have features that can leverage what customers are trying to do. I have nothing against Windows or IBM it has just been my preference to work with Oracle and MySQL environments. Oracle and BEA have played well in the large enterprise commercial environments. MySQL has played well in Internet and web applications. For anyone to say other vendors do not provide a good solution is pretty closed minded. What I like to do is understand what a customer is trying to do and weigh the pros and cons and let them make the decision that is best for customer.
Most companies are running different types of applications. - Java and SOA are extremely scalable and powerful solutions that are great when those benefits are needed.
- APEX is a strong Oracle solution that does not need application servers but it does require an Oracle database. APEX can be a very strong solution for Oracle Forms and Reports and legacy client/sever applications that are looking to move to a web based environment.
- Ruby on Rails and PHP are great for web based applications that do not need a lot of database features.
I have been very impressed with the feature/functionality of Oracle Express. I have not tried to deploy this in a production environment but in small case scenarios it has been really impressive. Especially if you are a technical Java or XML person. - Oracle Express and APEX can provide a strong low cost web solution.
There are current and future costs and ramifications associated with hardware, database, application server and application development decisions. Linux, APEX, Oracle Express, Oracle SQL Developer, Apache, JBoss, Ruby on Rails, PHP and SOA are providing more options than ever.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
At the RMOUG conference I was able to get a more detailed look at Oracle's Berkeley DB. I have to admit it is very coooool. I seen some XML demos using Oracle Berkeley DB and it was like waving a bone in front of a wolf's nose, it got my attention. The Oracle Berkeley DB, Oracle Berkeley DB XML and Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition are all things that really interest the technologist in me. Right now Oracle Berkeley DB cannot compete with everything MySQL brings to the table in terms of commercial and business solutions but the developer in me really wants to play with this tool.
Friday, February 15, 2008
I gave two presentations at RMOUG this year. I have retired from doing presentations at technical conferences but I had to pay a debt for crashing the RMOUG party last year. Doing a presentation was the price I had to pay. :) In all honesty, I really just wanted to help to contribute to the RMOUG because they are an excellent local Oracle user group and I wanted to help support them in any way possible. RMOUG gives out some of the coolest shirts, so I may try to come back next year to get one of the cool volunteer shirts they gave out to everyone. My two presentations were on: Understanding the MySQL Architecture for Oracle DBAs- This is a fast paced presentation focused on showing Oracle DBAs and Developers key features and benefits of using MySQL and the LAMP stack for projects. Topics will focus on: best practices for configuring a MySQL database server, understanding key differences between Oracle and MySQL and OFA versus MOCA. Attendees will also be introduced to MySQL replication and Cluster configurations. This is an excellent bootstrap presentation for developers and DBAs that may be looking at using MySQL and the LAMP stack for future projects.
- Audience: Developers and DBAs
- Summary: A bootstrap presentation focused on showing Oracle DBAs and developers key features of MySQL and the LAMP stack.
Demystifying Middleware Technologies- This presentation is designed to demystify popular Middleware technologies and explain how these technology components work together. Topics include: J2EE, Application Servers, Web Services, XML, Application Frameworks, WSDL, BPEL, SOA and business rule engines. Attendees will learn how each of these different Middleware components work together in application servers. This is an important presentation for developers and DBAs who would like to learn more about the middle-tier.
There is a podcast summary of the Demystifying Middleware Technologies presentation at web.mac.com/george.trujillo. Go to this site and then select Oracle Podcasts. I really enjoyed giving both of these presentations. I always shoot from the hip when I give presentations and let my mood and the mood of the audience determine the focus of the presentation. The MySQL presentation got a lot of enthusiasm from the Oracle DBAs because whenever I discuss the MySQL database server, Oracle DBAs are always really surprised by how much it can do and why it is growing in popularity. So this presentation was very upbeat and high energy. The Middleware presentation was more of a fireside chat on what are important things to understand about middleware technology that is not in the documentation and in the books but you really need to understand. I thank the attendees who laughed at my jokes even when they weren't funny. :) Labels: RMOUG
RMOUG ended yesterday, it was an excellent conference. There were a lot of excellent presentations. Conference highlights for me include:
- Rich Niemiec's presentation "All Uncommon Leaders" was one of the best presentations I've ever seen in my life. I've been going to business and technical conferences for about 15 years and listening to great speakers such as Gene Kranz (NASA flight director), Henry Kissinger, etc. and Rich is in the upper echelon of outstanding inspirational speakers. Way to go Rich!
- There were excellent presentations on Fusion Middleware, APEX, XQuery, etc.
- Congratulations to the speakers from Raytheon, every presentation I went to from the Raytheon team was outstanding.
- Noticed significant change in trends in topics selected and focus of presenters. When you looked at the presentation topics and how full the rooms were, you were definitely able to see where the interest resides in the Oracle user community.
- RMOUG continues to attract the top presenters in the industry, naming a few: Thomas Kyte, Jonathan Lewis (met for the first time), Peter Koletzke, Paul Dorsey, Tim Gorman, John King, Duncan Mills, Michael Ault, Steve Lemme, Don Burleson, etc. I don't mean to leave anyone out these are just the list of people I have seen speak in the last year. Speaking to any of these excellent speakers is definitely worth its weight in gold.
It just continues to boogle my mind that local companies do not send more people to conferences like RMOUG and the IOUG. With all the complexity of database and development environments it's amazing that companies will not send more employees to listen to the top industry leaders for a few hundred dollars. Oh well, it was a great conference for me.
Labels: IOUG, Oracle conference, RMOUG
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) an alliance group with the IOUG every year puts on an outstanding conference in Denver, CO. This conference is one of the best returns on investment for training you can get anywhere in the world. This years agenda looks fantastic as always. When looking at the agenda, topics that stand out to me:
- Lots of presentations on Oracle Database 11g New Features.
- Application Express (APEX).
- Oracle Fusion Middleware.
- XML.
- Security.
- Oracle development.
RMOUG as always brings together some of the top industry leaders and presenters in the United States. The agenda for this year's training days looks fantastic as always. The leaders of RMOUG understand how to put on a great conference. If in the Denver area try to attend, I believe this is one of the don't miss training opportunities of the year. RMOUG always makes you feel welcome and creates a create atmosphere.
The conference always starts with the speaker and volunteer reception. We hope to see you there.
Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle training, RMOUG, Trubix
Thursday, January 31, 2008
In today's global Internet environment we all see things are changing faster and faster every day. The side effect of this is organizations and individuals push back by trying to keep everything the same. It's more important than ever that to be thinking about: - How do we continue to adapt our business processes for a world where technology is constantly changing?
- What are our sources to make sure we have the correct business insight into open standards and open source and we are increasing value to our customers?
- Do we periodically make sure sure we have the right focus and alignment between user centricity and our corporate goals?
- How do we measure the Reliability, Availability, Service and Security (RASS) within our technical infrastructures?
"Even if you are not moving in the right direction as an organization, you should at least be pointed in the right direction". Labels: George Trujillo
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
As a student of history I went and listened to Henry Kissinger once. He said before World War I there was a tremendous amount of prosperity in the western world but everyone new war was coming. He said there was no reason for World War I to ever have occurred but everyone at that time knew it was inevitable. If you look at the IT industry today and the different acquisitions that are occurring you can start to see how the competitors and strategies are lining up. Here are a number of the key groups that will define direction and have an impact on where the IT industry is going. I picked these due to their capability to act as change agents: - Oracle - Database server, middleware, applications.
- IBM - Database server, middleware, professional services.
- SAP - Applications.
- Microsoft - Operating systems and software.
- Sun, HP and Dell - Hardware and professional services.
- Internet companies - Google, Yahoo, YouTube, MySpace, etc.
- Open Source - The companies, products and initiatives of the community.
- Web 2.0 - Wikis, Blogs, Social networks, Mashups, etc.
- The Internet - The power of connectivity and access.
- Startup companies - The fuel for the Internet.
As I said previously, 2008 is going to be a very interesting year. I'm especially interested in the database and middleware arena. New features and releases coming out towards the second half of 2008 is going to create some very interesting redirections of the IT industry. As an Oracle DBA or developer where do you see yourself in this Internet picture? Also, how are your skills evolving to stay marketable in this changing world? Labels: George Trujillo
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
This may be an interesting year of acquisitions. Oracle's purchase of BEA and Sun's purchase of MySQL are definitely starting the year out with a bang. Red Hat's purchase of JBoss is also going to be interesting. As the Internet and open source continue to evolve daily, we can definitely expect more fireworks in 2008.
Oracle right now seems to be the master of acquisitions. Oracle has proven the great ability to successfully integrate the companies they purchase. From the purchases of J.D. Edwards, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Retek, Hyperion, etc. we can expect that Oracle has a strong integration strategy for BEA. The winners are going to be Oracle customers and middleware technologists. With the power of the core of WebLogic and AquaLogic being added to Oracle's middle tier, it will add a lot of power to Oracle as it goes toe to toe with IBM for the enterprise middleware space.
From a pure technoogy view, this is a great move for Oracle. For how much Oracle paid for BEA and what Oracle will do with BEA, I'll leave it to the industry analysts and wall street to determine if it was a good purchase. I've been busy enough on the Oracle side with the BPEL process manager, SOA Suite, XML and JDeveloper platform, I'm getting a headache thinking about WebLogic and AquaLogic. Does anybody else feel their head leaking when they think about middleware. The year 2007 was a banner year for Oracle acquisitions. It will be fun to see what Oracle does in 2008.
Labels: BEA, George Trujillo, Oracle
Today, January 16, 2008, Oracle announced an agreement to acquire BEA Systems, Inc. This is sure to bring new innovativeness to the strong middleware position Oracle currently has with Oracle Fusion Middleware. BEA is a strong leader in the middleware space. With this purchase we can all expect acceleration of the SOA and Java-based technologies Oracle is currently offering today. The interoperability of Oracle Fusion Middleware and BEA will offer customers more options and flexibility with middleware solutions in the future.
The middle-tier is playing an increasing role in database architectures with identity management, SOA, BPEL, XML and Java based applications. As customers requirements become more complex, the increased options and flexibility that this acquisition will bring is important to Oracle customers. This brings the power of Oracle's BI purchases such as Hyperion and the Web 2.0 and the SOA stack that BEA has. Instead of looking at this as Oracle purchasing BEA, it is also important to also look at the new stew ingredients that Oracle and BEA have with Hyperion, Web 2.0 components, AquaLogic, XML, SOA stacks, etc. When you look at the ingredients as if a stew is being put together, the components of this stew mix that Oracle and BEA can now set on the table is pretty interesting to middleware enthusiasts.
Labels: BEA, George Trujillo, Oracle
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Oracle Open World from my perspective and a lot of people I've talked to was one of the best Oracle Open World in years. Main reasons:
- Lots of energy and excitement over Oracle products and applications.
- Great user and vendor turnout.
- Oracle and user groups (IOUG, OAUG, Quest, IOUC, HEUG, etc) all working really well together. When this happens the entire Oracle user community gains.
- Lots of innovation, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Applications, Hyperion and Business Intelligence, Enterprise Web 2.0 and the new features in all the Oracle products.
- Great networking with Oracle Connect, unconferences and an incredible array of evening networking events.
- Great combination of Marketing presentations to understand strategic directions balanced with a very good technical presentations. There was plenty for everybody.
It was also an exciting conference for the future of the DBA. Companies have been using software, hardware and outsourcing to greatly reduce the number of working DBAs in the market. A key point that stood out to me is that there are going to be a lot of new opportunities for DBAs that are willing to learn new things they will be rewarded by being in hot demand for the next couple of years. Some key areas where growth will create a demand and high revenue for Oracle DBAs and Developers:
- Data Infrastructure Administrators (DIAs) - who can manage multiple tiers of an Oracle infrastructure. These DBAs will support the Database Server and Application Server in an enterprise.
- DBAs who can configure and support Hyperion and BI as it moves into the database. Hyperion may grow at a tremendous rate over the new few years.
- Developers who can develop and customize Oracle Fusion Applications using Oracle Fusion Middleware.
- DBAs who can configure and support the Oracle Application Server and Enterprise Web 2.0.
- DBAs who can support advanced Oracle configurations such as RAC, Streams, Data Guard and OEM.
- DBAs that can support Oracle applications.
There are additional areas but these are the three that stand out to me.
Labels: George Trujillo, Hyperion, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Open World
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Getting your first job as an Oracle DBAI received a comment on the blog about how someone changing careers can get their first job as an Junior Oracle DBA. I thought this a very good question so I thought I would share my answer with everyone. There are specific areas I would work on to get a job as a Junior Oracle DBA. - Get certified to demonstrate some basic level of Oracle DBA knowledge.
- Learn the Optimal Flexible Architecture.
- Practice to get some hands on experience to develop basic skills.
- Learn how to sell yourself and understand how to write a good resume, cover letter and prepare for a successful interview.
- Get comfortable with the Oracle documentation and the key reference manuals.
- Learn where to go to network.
Get CertifiedChanging careers to become an Oracle DBA is a definite challenge. If you are looking at becoming an Oracle DBA and you are new to technology then I do feel the certification will definitely help you. It will at least show a certain level of knowledge and a commitment to learning the Oracle technology. The Optimal Flexible Architecture defines a set of guidelines and standards for how to configure an Oracle database server. Most companies follow OFA to some degree. OFA defines well known best practices for how to configure an Oracle database server.
Practice to develop basic skillsAlong with that an Oracle DBA has to work in a technical environment. The more a potential employer can feel you can move into their environment and be successful, the more likely you are to get hired. Basic Unix and networking skills are also important to be an Oracle DBA. Understanding the fundamentals of Unix, shell programming and being able to install and manage Oracle in a Unix environment is also important. The good thing is that with VMWare in can be relatively inexpensive to install VMWare (around $80), then you can install a free version of Linux (i.e. Enterprise Linux) or Fedora or SuSE and you can then go through the installation steps to install Oracle on Unix/Linux. Practicing a little bit every day will add up to a lot over a period of time.
Basic skills you should work on: - Read OFA 5 times and conform to its guidelines.
- Install Oracle according to OFA. Be able to setup a tnsnames.ora environment.
- Make sure you completely understand the Oracle architecture (SGA, background processes, server processes, data files, system tablespaces, redo logs, archive logs, init.ora and spfile).
- Be able to write a Unix script to perform a cold backup using a cron job.
- Be able to perform full and incremental backups using RMAN. Practice different recover scenarios.
- Get comfortable with the data dictionary main views (DBA_DATA_FILES, V$instance, etc.)
- Search on the Internet for Oracle DBA best practices to see what other DBAs are doing.
- Be able to set up archiving, perform backups and be able to clean up archived files that have been backed up.
- Read some introductory chapters on performance tuning. For SQL tuning understand how to understand an Explain Plan and how to perform a SQL trace and run a TKProf report.
- Read up on top 10, 20 top things to tune for an Oracle DBA.
Be able to present yourself successfully to a potential employerBeing able to sell yourself and the positive things you would bring to an organization. This is just as important as your technical skills. Companies are always looking to hire someone that has a strong work ethic, will contribute positively to a team and someone that has a great attitude and fits in with a team. The key part of getting your first opportunity as a Junior DBA is selling a potential employer on yourself.
What do you see as your key assets? What can you do to present yourself well to a potential employer? Read up on how to succeed in an interview and interview tips and interview mistakes. Dress professionally for your interviews and be early for your interview. Read up on the company, see what interests you about working for that company and ask the interview questions about the company that show you are interested in joining a quality organization.
To get an opportunity as a Junior DBA you need to show a potential employer that your personal assets and intangibles can make up for you lack of experience. I can tell you that I know a number of people that have changed careers to become an Oracle DBA and they sold the company on themselves to get their first job as an Oracle DBA. I assure you companies are looking for people that work hard, have great attitudes, are trust worthy and can contribute positively to a team. These type of people are hard to find, finding someone with just DBA skills is pretty easy for a company.
Key Oracle Reference ManualsBelow are key Oracle reference manuals you should be very comfortable with. - Oracle Concepts Manual - has entire chapters on different parts of the Oracle architecture.
- Oracle Reference Manual - key chapters on data dictionary views and initialization parameters
- Oracle SQL Reference Manual - get comfortable reading documentation to add a tablespace, modify a user, add a redo log group, etc.
Learn how to networkUsually the best jobs you get are through networking. Spend some time going to different local networking events. These events are usually a little uncomfortable for people how are new to them. However most networking groups are very motivated to make new attendees welcome. Networking events are also a great way to develop communication skills, learn about different companies and to let people know you are enthusiastic and looking for an opportunity as an Oracle DBA. Ask them questions you have about business, Oracle and any recommendations they have for companies to look at and apply to. Good networking events to attend: - Local Oracle user groups. Search on local Oracle user groups in your area. Most major cities have strong local Oracle user groups.
- Local Linux user groups.
- City Business chamber meetings
- Local Toastmasters meetings
- Local small business meetings
The first job as an Oracle DBA can be the hardest to find. Don't give up and develop a game plan on things you can do to increase chances for success. Good luck! Labels: George Trujillo, Getting your first Oracle DBA job, Oracle Certification, Oracle DBA
Thursday, November 15, 2007
One thing that stands out at Oracle Open World 2008 in San Francisco is the changing role of the Oracle DBA. There are a number of presentations showing how new Oracle technologies and the next generation of Oracle Grid Control are going to change how DBAs manage databases. Oracle DBAs that want to stay marketable are going to have to make sure their skills are consistent with the demands of the market. Oracle DBAs in demand are going to need to specialize in some of the following areas:
- Oracle High Availability - RAC and Data Guard
- Storage Management - Automatic Storage Management (ASM)
- Oracle Streams
- Oracle Grid Control - Using new tools, advisors and metholdologies for managing the enterprise.
- Oracle Fusion Middleware - Ability to manage multi-tiered architectures.
- Identity Management - Ability to work with Oracle Internet Directory and other LDAP servers.
- Ability to support Enterprise Web 2.0
- Ability to support multiple database platforms like MySQL.
The old days of an Oracle DBA being able to get by on just performance tuning and backup/ recovery skills are not going to be enough to stay marketable in the future. Basic skill sets are easy to find and easy to outsource. To get a better vision of the future you should look at new features in Oracle Database 11g that can greatly simplify database administration. Some of these include:
- Automatic SQL tuning
- New Diagnostics Advisor
- RMAN Advisor
- SQL Tuning Advisor
This list is a very small subset of all the diagnostic and advisor tools available in the Oracle Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database 11g. These large set of tools are going to play a large role in managing Oracle production environments. The old days of writing custom scripts are almost over. DBAs are going to use more tools like Grid Control automate a lot of the day to day tasks DBAs typically perform. Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Open World
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
There was an excellent expert panel on Oracle Database 11g New Features on Sunday that helped set the tone for Oracle Database 11g for the week. This panel had recognized leaders in the Oracle user community and key leaders that were part of the Oracle Database 11g beta program. Trubix has been part of the Oracle Database 11g Beta program since the fall of 2006. The panel included: - George Trujillo - Oracle Database 11g Beta Program Leadership Council
- Dan Norris
- John King
- Charles Kim
- Plamen Zyumbyulev
Oracle Open World is strongly emphasizing Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g throughout the conference. You can also expect that Oracle Database 11g will be emphasized at the upcoming Collaborate 2008 Conference in April, 2008 in Denver, CO. You can expect to see a quicker adoption of Oracle Database 11g with its outstanding features as well as its stability. This option will be a stronger consideration for leap frogging Oracle 10g.
There are blog entries below that summarize Oracle Database 11g New Features.
Labels: George Trujillo, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Open World
People used to have fun saying Fusion Confusion, etc. Those days are over. Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware are emerging key areas of Oracle applications and technology. Saying “Fusion Confusion” is showing that you are not in touch with what is going on with Oracle technology. This next generation of Oracle’s strategy will impact those directly involved in Oracle technology as well as those reliant upon it. Current and future Oracle DBAs and developers will need to be able to support Oracle Fusion Application environments. For Oracle DBAs, being able to support Oracle Fusion Middleware environments is going to be a steep learning curve. System administrators are starting to fill the gap of the need for administrators who can support the Oracle middletier. If you want to stay marketable as an Oracle developer, you are going to need to learn at least parts of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, Siebel, Retek and Hyperion applications are all going to need administrators that can manage multiple tiers of Oracle and non-Oracle infrastructures as well architects, developers that understand Oracle Fusion Middleware technology. With the explosion of middleware technologies such as Application Servers, J2EE, Web Services, SOA, BPEL, Business Rules, XML, etc. there will be a strong need for Oracle Fusion Middleware professionals.
Sharing a few Oracle Open World Experiences Oracle Open World in San Francisco is one of the best (maybe the best) conference Oracle I've been to. There is so much energy and excitement I thought I would share a few of my experiences.
Catching the Excitement of Oracle Open World in the Caribbean
I was on a flight from San Juan Puerto Rico heading towards San Francisco for Oracle Open World (OOW). Someone sitting next to me seen I was in the Oracle documentation on my laptop. She asked if I was going to OOW and I said yes. She said that she was too. She and a number of members of her team were headed for OOW as well. Before long we were talking about how excited we all were to be heading to OOW. The excitement of everyone going to OOW seems to be a constant for everyone I talked to in San Francisco. I’ve been to a lot of Oracle Open Worlds and I can’t remember when there was so much enthusiasm for customers, vendors as well as Oracle employees. On Saturday and Sunday all the meetings I had seemed to be full of smiles and a lot of enthusiasm and energy. Saturday night we had an IOUG board meeting and invited some key volunteers from the conference to join us. It was a great dinner and a lot of fun to discuss upcoming IOUG activities and events for the upcoming conference.
Sunday morning I had some early morning meetings and did some final preparation for a 90 minute expert panel I was leading on Oracle Database 11g New Features. I had a lunch meeting and headed over to the Moscone Center. I got registered and headed up to the IOUG booth where I ran into a number of board members from the IOUG and key leaders from the IOUG. It seems like everywhere I went I was running into people I knew and everyone was full of smiles and you could feel the excitement. IOUG Helps Launch the Start of Oracle Open World
The International Oracle Users Group (IOUG) was given a large number of presentation slots to launch Oracle Open World. Key IOUG leaders delivered technical presentations ranging from Oracle Database 11g New Features (my presentation), RAC, ASM, Oracle Application Server, Security, Oracle Fusion Middleware, etc. all focusing on best practices. The IOUG has always emphasized best practices. It was great to see the IOUG get recognized for leadership in the technology side of Oracle. The agenda for the week is one of the best I’ve every seen at an Oracle conference. Some things that stand out to me at the conference include:
- Great layout of technical presentations focusing on Oracle Database 11g.
- Large emphasis on Oracle Fusion Middleware.
- Strong focus on Enterprise Web 2.0 technologies.
- Oracle Applications seem to be everywhere.
- Great evening events with Billy Joel, Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac.
- New Unconference activities.
- Open World Connect allows networking with other conference attendees. A great way to bring people together. This is a new level of networking at conferences which includes the opportunity to start your own blog.
Attendees had a choice of getting a flash drive with the conference technical presentations or getting a hard copy book. I liked being give that choice. I preferred the flashdrive. I’m slowly making a move off of hard copy materials and moving everything to a wiki or web sites. With Enterprise Web 2.0 growing in momentum we are all going to need to make the move to more electronic materials.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Oracle Open World (OOW) is right around the corner. With the size of OOW, its become more important than ever to preregister for events. There is a lot of excitement and energy around all the new and evolving technology around Oracle. Don't forget the IOUG SIG day on Sunday. We hope to see you there.
What are a number of evolving areas to stay up to speed on? We took an internal poll and here are the top areas our teams were interested in on the technology side:
- Oracle Database 11g New Features
- Oracle SOA Suite
- Oracle Fusion Middleware
- Hyperion
- Oracle Data Vault
- Oracle Audit Vault
- Oracle ILM
- WebCenter and Web 2.0
- Oracle technical DBAs and Oracle Apps Administration
- Oracle Application Server
It took us a long time to get it down to a top ten. To get us to agree on the order of the top ten would have involved jousting. So this order was picked from a hat.
A constant theme of a number of the articles on this site is the importance to keep expanding your technical skill set. Hope to see you there.
Labels: Oracle Open World
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
The current wave of technology is the alignment of IT applications (software) with business processes. Middleware technology tools are driving this direction. Increasing competitiveness in global markets, changing customer needs are requiring businesses to respond faster and faster to this change. Along with this is the importance of compliance and governance. Two middleware tools are addressing these demands: the Business Process Execution Language and Business Rules. Both of these tools allow business users and processes to drive the direction of IT applications. Tools such as the Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Business Rules are providing customers with more agility and flexibility so they can have their IT applications be able to change quickly in a well-defined way. The success of SOA projects are increased significantly with the use of BPEL. Adding more agility and flexibility with applications occurs when using business rules. The Oracle Fusion Middleware technology stack continues to grow with Oracle Business Rules being added to the stack.
Labels: Oracle Fusion Middleware
Thursday, July 19, 2007
I get a lot of questions on SOA and BPEL, so I wanted to talk a little about them to make sure that if you are at a party and the topics of SOA and BPEL come up, you can join the conversation. When people are talking about the BPEL, WSDL, or the shizzle you need to understand what they mean. This is important because a few years ago RAC and margarita parties were very popular, now Oracle Fusion middleware and mojito parties are all the rage. In fact, I was at one of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco, Colibri a Mexican Bistro and while having a mojito the person next to me started talking about middleware.
Aligning Business Processes and ApplicationsBatman and Robin, the Green Hornet and Kato, Harry Potter and Hermione and now SOA and BPEL. For most of these you can't imagine one without the other. A key for enterprise organizations is focusing on improving the alignment of business processes with technology (software applications). Business processes are constantly changing and organizations need to be very good at managing that change.
Web services, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the Business Processing Execution Language (BPEL) have become very popular approaches to address the following important challenges:
- Managing changes to business processes and reflect those changes with its applications.
- Getting all kinds of different types of applications to work together.
ServicesA service is an endpoint in a connection. The endpoint contains a standalone function (provider service) that can accept input (from a consumer service) to perform a task and then return a result. This function is self-contained and is not dependent on any other service to perform its specific task. A number of services can communicate with each other to perform more complex tasks. The services communicate using XML based WSDL service descriptions. Web Services, WSDL, UDDI, XML and ESBWeb services is the technology for connecting services. Web Services has become the technology for achieving interoperability with different languages, operating systems and hardware platforms. Web services is a distributed technology for connecting different types of applications that are supported by all vendors. A web service is an application that provides some type of business functionality while hiding the details of how it works. Software applications can then use web services (software applications that provide specific functionality) to perform a task or operation.
The technology components that make Web Services work includes:
- Web Services Description Language (WSDL) - Uses XML data structures for describing services as a set of endpoints. Service requests use WSDL to understand how to communicate and how to send information back and forth.
- Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) - (UDDI) is a registry that stores information (WSDL) on services. Kind of like a phone book stores phone numbers.
- The eXtraction Modification Language (XML) is a data structure containing metadata and data that is used for sending information back and forth. You can think of XML as being the plumbing that makes everything work.
- Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) - SOAP is the protocol for how XML based messages get sent across the Internet using HTTP/HTTPS.
- An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a communication infrastructure that allows different middleware products and protocols to communicate. The ESB provides routing, transformation, the management of services and message processing capabilities. All your applications may not be using web services, so the ESB can function as an intermediary for different types of communication.
The Service Oriented Architecture
The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides services (web services), messaging (exchange of data), self-describing interfaces (WSDL), service registries (UDDI), service quality and the organization of services (BPEL) into business processes. SOA does not specify the technology components to use. SOA uses services that can be used without the service knowing anything about the application calling it and the calling application not needing to know how the service performs its task. SOA is an architecture that facilitates the creation of loosely coupled services (applications) that can be executed from any platform. Services communicate using well-defined descriptions or contracts using WSDL. This complete hides which language a service is written in. Services can be written in Java, .NET, C#, PL/SQL and PHP to name a few.
Changing Environments
The computer industry has gone through significant changes. From mainframes, to client-server, to multi-tiered web environments and now to a service oriented architecture. Every technology has had its place. Business flexibility, integration, coordinating business processes with applications have forced the move to a service oriented environment. What's funny is that SOA and web services can increase the life of legacy systems.
BPEL a common language.
The problem in getting technical and business people to communicate well is they need a common language. For example, technical people speak languages like Oraclese and business people speak languages like Parseltongue. The Business Processing Execution Language (BPEL) for Web Services (WS-BPEL) or (BPEL4WS) is a high level language that both technical and business people can both speak.
BPEL is a business process modeling language that can be executed. BPEL defines business processes for web services using XML. This is why BPEL plays such a strong role in the Service Oriented Archiecture.
Some of the features that BPEL offers:
- Organizing how services (software applications) are aligned with business processes.
- Definition of business processes.
- Automation of web services.
- Managing synchronous and asynchronous operations.
- Executing services in sequence or in parallel.
- Managing short or long running transactions.
- Resuming interrupted or failed operations.
- Scheduling activities.
- Define business processes with several scopes.
- Route messages.
- Define business logic through the organization of services.
- Create business processes from smaller processes.
BPEL is definitely helping organizations make the implementation of SOA successful. Tools such as the Oracle BPEL Process Manager are making it a lot easier to introduce BPEL into an organization and increasing the adoption of SOA. The Oracle BPEL Process Manager can be used by business analysts and technical people to communicate on how to align business processes and software applications.
The Oracle BPEL Process Manager runs in the Oracle JDeveloper product or it can be installed into tools such as Eclipse. The Oracle BPEL Process Manager also works with the majr application server vendors. Although we mention the Oracle BPEL Process Manager, BPEL products are available from IBM, Sun, Microsoft and a large array of 3rd party companies. The OASIS Technical Committee (WSBPEL TC) is currently working on the WS-BPEL 2.0 draft. This draft focuses more on extentions to the the existing WS-BPEL 1.1 version.
BPEL is a standard that manages web services and is language independent. However, most web services are implemented with the Java Enterprise Edition or Microsoft .NET. There are also BPEL servers that are provided by a number of different companies. BPEL helps the success rate of SOA projects. One way of looking at this is, think of a service of being a house or building that generates a product or needs a product, web services as being the houses or buildings, XML (WSDL) being how people in the houses and buildings communicate, SOA as being the town and BPEL defining how the town is organized.
Organizations that are using SOA and BPEL are having much more success with higher end-user satisfaction versus the companies that are trying to just implement web services. Hopefully this will put a little more shizzle in your conversations on SOA and BPEL.
Labels: Oracle Fusion Middleware
An Exciting Launch!It was exciting to be invited to the Oracle Database 11g launch in New York City. As part of the Oracle beta leadership council, it was great to see so much energy and interest surrounding the Oracle Database 11g release. One thing that is very important with the growth of data and the need of businesses to be able to be nimble and respond to change quickly, is that databases need to constantly get faster, improve diagnostics and troubleshooting, reduce the cost of ownership and improve manageability. The Oracle Database 11g release definitely succeeds in all these areas. I thought one of the highlights was for the Independent Oracle Users Group ( IOUG) to get so much stage time with Charles Phillips. I felt is showed the tremendous input the IOUG has provided with the Oracle Database 11g product and Oracle's recognition of that. As a board of director for the IOUG and my involvement with the Oracle beta leadership council it was nice to see the important role the IOUG plays in the industry be recognized at such a high profile event. The IOUG is also continuing to play an ever increasing role in the Oracle 11g Middleware beta program due to the IOUG's profile in the Oracle Fusion middleware space. Oracle ReleasesHistorically speaking the first Oracle release of Oracle Database 5, 6, 7, 8, 8i, and 9i were definitely bleeding edge releases. However Oracle 10g and Oracle Database 11g have been by far the most stable and well tested first releases in the history of Oracle. While a lot of people were talking about not moving to the first release of Oracle 10g, they did not realize that Oracle 10g had a lot of bug fixes for Oracle 9i and had a lot of improvements in the advanced features of Oracle. I feel the Oracle beta program has had a significant positive impact on the Oracle 10g and 11g releases. By getting industry leaders from user groups such at the IOUG allows recognized industry leaders to have direct input and to provide feedback directly to Oracle product managers and developers. It has been wonderful to see how open Oracle has been to listening to the user groups and the incredible effort the Oracle product teams have put into the release. As Charles Phillips mentioned, Oracle Database 11g is the gold standard of Oracle releases and the Oracle beta program has been a large part of that success. Be Careful of Old SagesI understand the important need to be cautious about upgrading and to minmize risk and downtime. Everyone understands it is important to be careful about upgrading. You'll see an old sage say, well the new software release is interesting but I think I will wait for a later release. You'll then see a number of DBAs nod their heads in agreement. That's also like saying I am going to save my company money and reduce risk by continuing to run my company with old techniques that are out of date. Companies like this are running their databases more like the way they did 5 or 10 years ago with a sprinkling of new features being used. They are bragging about their up time yet not leveraging features that would help the organization and save it money. Safe is important but so is maximizing your ability to be competitive in the industry. The old saying, "if it isn't broke, dont' fix it" isn't always the best approach. Technology needs to leverage what businesses are doing and to give business a competitive advantages. Companies need to look more carefully at the benefits of new features and how these features can benefit the business. I am not saying take your highest profile database and move it to Oracle Database 11g when it first comes out. What I am saying is that customers looking to migrate lower profile Oracle 9i databases should strongly consider migrating to Oracle Database 11g to leverage the benefits of the new features. If the new features of Oracle Database 11g are used out of the box, a company has the opportunity to significantly reduce their cost of ownership, increase availability, improve performance and manageability. Benefits of Oracle Database 11gOracle Database 11g definitely hits the mark in: - Making the database and database applications run faster in key areas.
- Improves important features related to Real Application Clusters, Data Guard and Oracle Streams.
- Reduces cost of ownership with Change Assurance (Database Replay) and Lifecycle Management.
- Greatly improves manageability and diagnosability.
A few features I really like that may not make a top ten list but I really liked include: - PL/SQL gets faster and easier to adminster with native compilation without the need for an external compiler.
- Java in the database gets significantly faster.
- PHP in the database who would have ever thought.
If you are an organization that needs to leverage technology to improve the business and make it more competitive then I highly recommend a detailed review of Oracle Database 11g features to see what benefits can help your business. You may decide not to move to Oracle Database 11g but to keep your organization as competitive as possible, a through analysis of Oracle Database 11g should be done.
Labels: Oracle Database 11g
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
In Oracle 11g, everyone is going to be amazed with the level of new features in the Oracle 11g database server. The Oracle 11g Database Server contains new features and enhancements in the areas of Manageability, High Availability, Performance, Content Management, Security, Information Lifecycle Management, Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence capabilities. There are also a number of new features related to development including PL/SQL, Java, .SQL Developer, Application Express, .NET, PHP and BI Publisher.
Once Oracle releases Oracle 11g to the public, we will finalize our set of topics and have new classes in Oracle 11g available immediately. We look forward to seeing you in our Oracle 11g classes and showing how to lower your cost of ownership and increase your managability of the Oracle 11g database server.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
 To address the need of Oracle DBAs and developers, Trubix is launching a full series of Oracle Fusion classes. These classes are designed specifically to teach Oracle Fusion technology from an Oracle perspective. You can visit the Trubix website to look at our Oracle Fusion classes in more detail. We are pretty excited about these classes because the design and layout of these classes were generated by feedback from our top clients as to what was the specific training they needed for them to be successful with Oracle Fusion.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
The Oracle database continues to evolve with key outstanding features that will provide a high return on investment immediately out of the box with the new features in Oracle Database 11g. Every database vendor offers a database that offers specific benefits. What I have always liked about Oracle, is the Oracle Database Server has by far more feature functionality than any other vendor. This offers the DBA an extremely rich set of tools to solve complex problems in today's environments. In Oracle Database 11g, Oracle takes a very large leap in innovation and feature functionality.
Key features that everyone will be interested in include: - Awesome change ensurance features with Database Replay and SQL Replay.
- Secure Files (next generation LOBs). Significantly faster than LOBs with more flexbility.
- SQL Plan Management.
- Java, XML DB, PL/SQL, APEX and PHP add a lot of performance and feature enhancements.
- Excellent enhancements in compression and encryption across the board.
- Very nice enhancements to partitioning, including automatic partitioning. New Partition Advisor.
- Read only tables, Virtual columns and invisible indexes
- Upgrade and downgrade enhancements.
- Solid enhancements in RMAN, RAC, Data Guard and Data Pump
- Automatic Diagnostic Repository.
- ASM enhancements include Fast Mirror Resyncs, rolling upgrades, new SYSASM role and migrations to ASM.
- Enhancements to temporary tablespaces.
- Read only tables.
The Oracle Database 11g New Product Features blog (below) goes into more details of Oracle 11g New Features. Labels: Oracle Database 11g
I was telling a friend about the new Oracle Database 11g server and they said, "You're kidding, we haven't even moved all of our databases to Oracle 10g. Why should I care about Oracle Database 11g? I hope to be retired by the time the Oracle Database 11g is introduced into my company". I answered with, I've spend the last five years watching companies make bad hardware, software and database management decisions because they did not know how the new features in Oracle 10g could impact their database environments. Or understand the high cost of ownership of their databases because they are managing their databases today pretty much the same way they were ten years ago. Reasons why you should care about features in a new release of the Oracle database:
- It is very important that a company understand how features in a new release of the Oracle database server will impact their current database management practices and decisions.
- The correct decisions made today will reduce migration issues in the future.
- The only way to make the right decisions today, is by understanding where database management is going in the future.
- Understanding current and future skill sets needed for IT staff.
- I believe you don't always have to be moving in the right direction, but you should always try to be pointed in the right direction.
- With Oracle Database 11g Database Replay and SQL Replay, the migration to Oracle Database 11g might be done at significantly reduced costs versus Oracle 10g.
- As Oracle 9i moves towards being desupported, Oracle Database 11g may be a stronger migration path than Oracle 10g.
I have been working with Oracle since version 4, so I've seen a lot of new releases. I still remember having to install over 20 5.25" floppy disks, when referential integrity was only declared and not enforced, as well as the old max extent limit of 121. The old days weren't always the good old days. I have helped customers with the rollouts of new Oracle software versions for a good part of my career. This includes internal rollouts to Oracle Corporation for 5.5 years. I was a lead in the internal rollouts of Oracle 8.0, 8i, 9i, JDeveloper, RAC, Streams and new releases of the Oracle Application Server. Since then I have had a leadership role in the Oracle Beta program for Oracle 10g and 11g.
For the most part, DBAs have been a little frustrated by the number of bugs and feature restrictions in Oracle 6, 7, 8 and 9i in the first releases of each version.
- The issues with previous first releases of a major version of Oracle database software has taught DBAs to historically stay away from the first release and to be very careful when using new features.
- I think Oracle put too much advertising in the Object-Relational features of the Oracle 8 database when the object features were not mature enough in the first release instead of focusing on features that would help DBAs in their day to day jobs.
- Oracle did the same thing with Java in the database with Oracle9i. Although Java in the database has turned into a fantastic feature especially for Oracle product and feature development, most DBAs didn't initially see the value of Java in the database.
However, Oracle 10g was by far the most stable release of a new version of Oracle software. Oracle 10g also had a large number of bug fixes for Oracle 9i, so Oracle 10g was even a more stable version of Oracle9i. Oracle 10g also had a lot of enhancements and bug fixes for advanced features of Oracle such as RAC, Data Guard, Streams, etc. The Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) took a gigantic leap from a tool in Oracle 9i that most DBAs snickered at, to a strong Enterprise solution with Grid Control in Oracle 10g. DBAs should have been moving to Oracle 10g to take advantage of the important new features and increased stability, instead they were using the old pattern of moving slowly to a new release and to using the new features of a new release.
Oracle 10g has by far more new features that should be used out of the box than any previous release of Oracle. The features in Oracle 10g are so significant, the Oracle 10g features should change the way DBAs are managing their systems. Yet, DBAs have been very slow in adopting these new features. If you look at a lot of Oracle 10g shops, they are running their databases closer to Oracle 7 features than Oracle 10g features. The release of Oracle 10g added tremendous functionality to database environments that Oracle DBAs need to leverage.
I have been involved with Oracle Database 11g since the summer of 2006, so I can tell you the upcoming release is very interesting. Its amazing how many new features there are in this new release. There are brand new features, existing feature enhancements and a lot of enhancements to make Oracle faster. Oracle Database 11g has added some very interesting enhancements in RMAN, Streams, Data Guard, RAC, diagnosability, RMAN repairability, XML, security, Java, PL/SQL, Data Pump, tables, tablespaces, partitioning, performance and management to name a few area highlights.
As I looked at the Oracle Database 11g release of the database server one thing stood out to me. Organizations really need to look at their database management strategies and how they are going to manage all their databases in their environment. I think it is VERY important that companies leverage the new features in a database and tie the use of the new features into their best practices. I have a tendency to buy the hottest high technology gadgets but historically I never use more than 10 percent of the features. I find most customers are the same way with their databases. This is bad because the new features in Oracle 10g can significantly reduce their cost of ownership if organizations would use them correctly. I cannot state strongly enough that as organizations move to the Oracle 10g and Oracle Database 11g they really need to look out how they are going to tie these new features into their database management practices and leverage these features to minimize down time and reduce their cost of ownership.
As our multi-tiered database environments get more complex we need enhanced tools for managing these environments and for improving performance as our databases get bigger. There is also a strong need for improving the management of advanced database features such as RAC, Data Guard and Streams. Oracle Database 11g strongly addresses these areas.
This is not a comprehensive list of all of the new features in Oracle Database 11g. Below is more of a summary of key areas I like in Oracle Database 11g of the database server.
Change assurance (important for saving money during testing and migration) - Change assurance new features of Database Replay and SQL Replay can play a large role in reducing costs, testing and issues when migrating to Oracle Database 11g. This is one of the best new features in this release.
- Database replay - captures actual production workload and replays it on a separate system.
- SQL performance analyzer - finds and fixes SQL performance degradations
- 10gR2 will have a patch set, that will allow the replay to occur.
Secure Files (Next generation LOBS) - Eliminates need for file systems. Very fast access of files.
- Just as fast as file systems with all the capabilities of the Oracle database (it’s a new LOB type). It is very fast at accessing the files from a file system.
- Store all your data in the database with one consistent:, Security and auditing model
- Backup and recovery mechanism
- Storage management (ASM)
- Transaction and concurrency model
- Interface and protocol
- Values added services like encryption, compression, and de-duplication
LOBS - Fast bulk data transfers
- LOB prefetch (where was this in Oracle8 when we needed it)
- InterMedia enhancements to LOBs
- SecureFiles compression, encyrption and optimization
- Installs/Deinstalls and other fun on weekends
High Availability (RAC, Data Guard, LifeCycle Management)- Fast-Start Failover for maximum performance mode in a Data Guard configuration.
- Compression of redo traffic (for Gap Resolution) over the network in a Data Guard Configuration.
- Real-Time query of a physical standby database while redo apply is active.
- Dynamic setting of Oracle Data Guard SQL apply parameters.
- A physical standby database can be opened temporarily for reporting and testing. Redo is still applied while database is in this state.
- Online database upgrades for data guard physical standby. Can upgrade logical standby database, then run both in parallel, then switch them.
- Can take standby databases, and take them out of standby to do testing and can then move them back into standby modes.
- RAC enhancements in OEM for monitoring and diagnostics. A lot of nice enhancements.
- Improved metrics.
- Next generation RAC cache fusion is even more scalable.
- Query results caches
- Fast caching of query/function results for read-mostly data
- Good enhancements to ADDM for diagnosing and tuning an entire RAC cluster as well as individual instances.. This includes improved diagnostics with Global cache interconnect issues and global resource contention, I/O bandwidth and hot blocks.
RMAN- A Virtual Private Catalog can now make sure an RMAN user can only see databases they are authorized to use.
- Archive log management for Streams and Data Guard
- Network aware DUPLICATE
- Optimized undo backup
- Improved corrupt block detection
Manageability- A new MEMORY_TARGET parameter that will improve the automatic memory management across shared and private memory areas.
- Simplified Temp Space Management
- Enhanced OFA Support
- Server side connection pooling.
- Secure configuration install option
- Stronger Password Protection
- Improved statistics generation for partitioned objects.
- Security enhancements with transparent tablespace and LOB encryption.
- SQL Repair Advisor
- Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR)
- Fast ANALYZE: Finding Table-Index Corruptions
- Automatic SQL Tuning with Self-Learning Capabilities that can identify top SQL statements and tunes them automatically by creating SQL profiles.
- Better SQL plan management allows the optimizer to maintain a history of
execution plans for a SQL statement. The optimizer can move to a new plan when it able to verify it is more efficient than an old plan.
- Streams management improves with automated alerts for Streams, a new DBMS_COMPARISON package than can help evaluate the consistency of data across databases, splitting and remerging of streams, LCR marking and tracking for diagnosing configuration issues, views and interfaces for understanding a Streams topology and a Streams Performance Advisor.
- Migration of DBMS_JOB jobs to the Oracle scheduler.
- SQL Test Case Builder
- Automatic Health Monitoring
- Manage and schedule jobs across multiple databases. This includes external jobs (i.e. shell scripts).
Automatic fault diagnostics- New facilities to capture and manage relevant information for incidents to speed support processes
- Support workbench.
- Repair advisors (coming in future releases)
- Speed analysis of root cause for faults
- Advice dbas on repair strategy
- The goal is to cut down on the trace files that are sent to Oracle.
Enterprise Manager Enhancements- Support for ASM File Access Control, ASM Manageability, ASM Rolling Migrations, OCR and Voting, Disk in ASM, Disk Resync, Disk Zones, and Infrastructure. Security enhancements with ACL and Security Classes.
- Database cloning enhancements.
- Expected enhancements to the Database Home Page and Performance change as well as improved metrics, archiving and purging tracing and alert files, group copy of tnsnames.ora and viewing trace files, management of Oracle Text Indexes,
- New LogMiner enhancements in Enterprise Manager.
- Fine-Grained Access Control on Network Call-outs from the Database. New packages DBMS_TCP_AMIN and
- DBMS_IMADDR_ADMIN can control which hosts on the Internet an Oracle user can access with PL/SQL packages.
- Secure service registration with the listener out of the box.
Automatic fault diagnostics- New facilities to capture and manage relevant information for incidents to speed support processes
- Support workbench.
- Repair advisors (coming in future releases)
- Speed analysis of root cause for faults
- Advise DBAs on repair strategy
- The goal is to cut down on the trace files that are sent to Oracle.
Performance - Some areas that stand out as getting faster include: - Faster Data Guard.
- Faster simple SQL operations. Faster SQL with caching of frequently used SQL results.
- Faster DML triggers.
- Faster upgrades.
- Faster PL/SQL and Java (auto native compilation). Caching of frequently used procedures and functions results.
- Faster statistics generation.
- Faster sort operations.
Java, PL/SQL, XML, .NET, PHP, APEX- PL/SQL Native Compilation Without Needing a Third-Party C Compiler.
- Native PL/SQL use of Seq.Nextval in a PL/SQL program.
- PL/SQL can use CLOBs to get around 32KB limitation of SQL character strings.
- Enhanced PL/SQL warnings and error messages.
- PLSTIMER identifies hotspots and performance tuning opportunities in PL/SQL.
- New package DBMS_HPROF controls the recording of raw PLSTIMER data.
- Continued support of standards with JDBC 4.0 and JVM 5.0. Capability to upgrade to JVM 6.0 will be available in the future.
- Oracle JVM JIT supports transparent native Java compilation without a C Compiler.
- Significant performance improvements with JDBC performance especially with Advanced Queuing.
- JDBC supports server side result cache alone with OCI client side result cache. Additional things I liked included the "big" improvements in the JIT and RAC support for JDBC.
- New command line interface to OracleJVM making it a lot easier to work with the JDK in the database.
- Support for database resident JARs.
- JDBC support for starting and shutting down the database.
- Performance enhancements to XPath query for Java.
- XML applications can now process larger XML documents by loading and saving .
- DOM nodes in memory and using a page manager for physical binary data management.
- Unified Java API for XML allows mid-tier Java programs to leverage lazily loading by allowing a disconnected mode of operation that allows a XMLType to be used with a session pool model of connection management.
- APEX will be standard with an embedded PL/SQL gateway.
- APEX will have an application packager for packing and deployment of APEX applications.
Data Pump Enhancements to use when you're moving data - Compression and encryption enhancements
- Support for XML Schemas and schema-based tables.
- Transportable partitions
Data Warehousing and Analytics to use on a Friday night - New DETECT option for unusual records.
- New MAP option for detecting profiles.
- New PROFILE feature for find defined patterns.
- New analytics and data mining
Partitioning Enhancements that you'll like - Partition by parent/child reference
- Partition orders and order_lines together
- Virtual column partitiong
- Parition on virtual order status, active, less active, derived from multiple status fields in order record
- Referential partitioning
- More composite partitioning
- List/range, range/range, list/hash, list/list
- Ex: order status/month, month/day
- Automatic interval partitioning supports the automatic creation of time-based partitions.
- Single partition transport tablespace
Automatic Storage Management- Convert Single-Instance ASM to Clustered ASM by allowing ASM to be configured on all nodes.
- ASM gets even better in Oracle11. Some of the new features include:
- A new SYSASM role allows the separation of database management and storage management responsibilities.
- ASM Fast Disk Resync brings a repaired ASM disk on line in a much shorter time.
- ASM manageability gets better with enhancements to the ASMCMD utility, a new mount mode for rebalance performance, disk group metadata backup and improved disk group compatibility across software versions.
- Support for ASM Rolling Migrations for different versions of Oracle11g and upward.
XML DB- XML index enhancements ( very important!)
- XSLT performance enhancements
- NFS v4.0 support
- Enable the XDB HTTP Server for SOA (the Oracle database is a service)
- Updates to registered XML Schemas
- Optimizations for XQuery and XPATH
- XML DB repository trigger
- Recursive XML Schema handling
- Support of SQL/XML standards (SQL 2005)
- XBRL validation and XLink validation
- Binary xml storage
- Enhanced xml indexing
- Schema evolution
Miscellaneous Enhancements- Virtual columns (functions) on tables. Indexes on virtual columns.
- Enhancements to DBMS_SQL supporting LOBS, user-defined types and bulk operations.
Security - Enhanced passwords (case sensitive and enhanced password algorithm).
- Security on ports and URLs for FGAC (i.e. UTL_HTTP, UTL_SMTP, UTL_TCP).
Installs/Deinstalls- 9iR2 <-> 11g upgrade/downgrade
- 10gR1 <-> 11g upgrade/downgrade
- 10gR2 <-> 11g upgrade/downgrade
Labels: Oracle Database 11g
Monday, April 23, 2007
 I was pretty busy at the Collaborate 07 conference organizing the Select Magazine expert Panels. Select Magazine is constantly rated as one of the key benefits of being a member of the IOUG. The goal of putting on the expert panels was to bring together recognized experts in emerging technologies. The expert panels below brought together tremendous dialogue and discussion between the expert panels and the attendees. Below is a summary of the expert panels.
SummarySELECT Journal is sponsoring a series of expert panels each evening during COLLABORATE 07 that will highlight the key focus areas of SELECT Journal throughout 2007. These expert panels contain a Who's Who of international experts in Security, Grid Control and XML. These three areas are of key focus for emerging Oracle features and technologies. These panels contain Oracle Product Team members, IOUG knowledge experts and customers. Focus areas for SELECT Journal for 2007 include: Oracle Fusion Middleware (2nd quarter), Oracle Security (3rd quarter), Oracle XML Best Practices, and Oracle Database 11g.
Oracle Security Best PracticesModerator: Steve Lemme Panelists: Arup Nanda, Jack Brinson, Tammy Bednar, Dan Norris, Jeff Paddock Sunday, April 15, 2007, 5:15pm – 6:30pm, Reef C This panel of expert series will bring the Oracle product team on security and customers together to address best practices on Oracle security across all tiers of the Enterprise. Topics will include: - Enterprise Security across all tiers
- Different security models
- Tying all security components together (Database Vault, Audit Vault, and Identity Management)
- Access Control Lists
- Policy driven security
- Data protection using encryption and data masking
- Security monitoring and scanning
- Technical skills required for the new Security environment
- Transition steps
- Skill sets needed for the Security DBA
- Future direction in Oracle security
Oracle Grid Control Best PracticesModerator: Ken Jacobs Panelist: Alex Gorbachev, Gaja Krishna Vaidyantha, Rich Niemiec, Leng Tan, Martin Pena, Arup Nanda Monday, April 16, 2007, 6:00pm-7:00pm, Reef C This panel brings together Oracle Grid experts as well as customers to take a look at best practices for managing enterprise multi-tiered environments. Topics will include: - Enterprise Infrastructure Management (managing database, middle-tier infrastructures and applications)
- Thoughts to consider when moving to Grid
- Grid layout considerations
- Managing heterogeneous database environments
- Lessons learned
- Using Grid with plug-ins to manage additional app servers and SQL Server and DB2
- Best practice considerations for Grid
Oracle XML Best Practices Moderator: George Trujillo Panelists: Brad Brown, Geoffroy de Lamalle, Jinyu Wang, Ravi Murthy and Gaja Krishna Vaidyantha Tuesday, April 17, 2007, 6:00pm-7:00pm, Reef C Are you facing the increasing demands for building SOA infrastructure, adoption industry XML standards, publishing reports over the Internet or handling unstructured data? If so, the XML expert round table session will be your excellent starting point to learn about the existing XML technologies. This panel will discuss use cases where XML plays a key role in the business applications, the XML best practices, lessons learned and the future strategy. The session also provides a good venue for you to ask questions to our XML Experts from the Oracle Product team, IOUG XML experts and customers. Topics will include: - XML best practices for data storage
- XML best practices for data transformation
- XML query best practices
- XML validation best practices
- XML publishing
- Searching XML
- XML Database Management (replications, streams, administration)
- XML for integration (AQ, DB WS)
- Optimizing large scale XML operations
Labels: Collaborate 07 conference in Las Vegas
Collaborate 07 is the largest conference of the year for the Oracle community. Collaborate 07 brings together users from the IOUG, OAUG and Quest Oracle user groups. The conference from April 14 - 19, 2007 was a very dynamic and leading edge conference bringing together the technical and business application community.
There were a number of hot topics discussed during the Collaborate 07 conference. Some of the hottest and most interesting discussions occurred during lunches, between presentations and during evening events. There are a lot of hot topics that attendees wanted to discuss with other attendees. Hot topics that stood out to me included:
- Fusion Middleware Technical Components
- A lot of tools discussion on .NET, Fusion Middleware, Ruby on Rails, PHP, APEX, and Flash outside of Oracle Fusion.
- Customizations to make to current Oracle applications to prepare for future Fusion migrations.
- Changing role of the DBA.
- Oracle Database 11g.
- Oracle licensing.
- Security.
- Oracle WebCenter and BI Publisher generated a lot of buzz.
- SOA
- Increasing role and importance of middleware strategies.
- Business Intelligence.
- Best tools to manage heterogenous database environments and their relative costs. Understanding how tools like Spotlight, Grid Control, UniCenter, Toad, JDeveloper, Eclipse, SQL Navigator and SQL Developer all fit in. Is there a best tool or is it best to integrate all the options.
- Role of MySQL and SQL Server in environments running Oracle.
I was surprised to see the number of new and intermediate DBAs looking at improving their skills on core DBA products. There were also a lot of experienced DBAs trying to understand their role and upcoming skills as we get closer to Oracle Fusion technology. DBAs are looking to increasing their marketability and skills to get the best jobs possible.
Great Tools Debate Closed the Collaborate Conference
Here is the description that described the Great Tools Debate that closed the Collaborate Conference:
Chocolate or Vanilla? Or do you like Strawberry? In the grand scheme of things, flavor choices are easy decisions to make. Picking the right "flavor" of development tool for your organization's environment is mission critical to your company and not a simple task. Selecting the right tool in your role as the "Complete Database Technology Professional" while surviving in a world of RAD and web applications requires building applications quickly that are highly maintainable, scalable with high performance.
So how can the right tools help with your company's IT strategy? How can you select the best tools? How do you leverage Middleware, Database, Application, Reporting and Quality Assurance? Tools including Java, .Net, APEX, PHP, Ruby on Rails and Flash are all flavors of the day…which do you choose?
This Great Tool Debate will address the challenges and issues of selecting the right tools for your environment. Join our panel of experts including Rich Niemiec (needs no introduction), Dr. Paul Dorsey (Oracle development award winner), George Trujillo (Mr. Fusion Middleware), and John Scott for a lively debate and discussion. Ask them what their favorite flavors are…...
Labels: Collaborate 07 conference in Las Vegas
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