The Oracle Blog

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Trends for Oracle DBAs

Maintaining and Improving Your Technical Expertise

The 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 Importance

At 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

Collaborate 09 - IOUG, OAUG, Quest: Oracle Users Conference

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

Cloud Computing: The Importance of Understanding Technology Shifts

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