Oracle Technology Musings

When's a good time to start job-related blogging? I've been with Oracle fornot even two years now and it takes a while before you're up-to-speed with the company's products, the company's culture. Oracle Openworld looked like an ideal timing as we have a tendency to announce a couple of things.
I have no specialisation, so I knew my blog would never be as specific nor detailed as some others. So I had a look at what my strong points are... architecture, ITIL, system management. So this'll be a blog that will have a look at the different technologies Oracle offers, just a bit from different angle sometimes (I hope!).

This year's Database Machine was a slightly controversial announcements with Netapp as a gold sponsor of the event. A lot of excitement in the audience, but equally frustrations from a minority who left the audience.
The HP/Oracle Database machine: musings ;-)
First of all, the machine is not only mean, but green. The limitation of spindles on all disks that will be obtained by the intelligence on the storage will greatly reduce power consumption as this will outweigh the extra cpu we put on the storage. So Oracle scores on the green front (not mentioned by Larry I believe) on an event where a lot of attention was already paid to green initiatives: the reduced book, the recycling, the sessions at Yerba Buena Gardens.
Secondly: performance! It's extremely fast for datawarehousing and although Larry, in his enthousiasm, said that it can be used for OLTP we got a clear message from product management that the design was for datawarehousing. So if you want to use it for OLTP, it will probably be faster, but the question remains whether this is cost-effective. If anyone has an ROI model on this, do not hesitate to comment ;-)
Scalability
And maybe this should have been mentioned upfront, there's linear scalability by adding storage. By moving processing power and intelligence to the hardware, this means adding speed. So what about the bandwith? Well, by adding the cells (as the individual components are called), you just add bandwith... so linear. And tests have proven this!
Ease of management.
Well, I must say, that was one of my worries. If you push software towards the hardware stack, multiple times, then you're asking for trouble if you're not careful. But also on this front, the engineers were one step ahead. Each unit is independant, and although it will not be advised to have multiple versions of the Oracle Exadata software in connected cells, multiple versions càn run next to each other. So no downtime required for upgrades and no big bang approaches here.
Did I tell you that management will be included in Oracle Enterprise Manager? I guess you'd figured that one out by yourself by now, not?
Enterprise ready
Especially with the full Database Machine, you get the advantages of an appliance but with all the goodies mentioned above and a database engine that has proven its merits.

When looking via Google/Google Desktop (I remembered reading about it shortly after Oracle's announcement) for a defintion (if such a thing exists) of the term "Cloud Computing", I stumbled (quite rapidly) over this article from the multi-talented Stephen Fry.
And guess what? He mentions Larry Ellison very early in his article:

I first heard about the principles of what is now called the “cloud” but was then called “network computing” at a talk given many years ago by Larry Ellison.

There isn't a definition as such, but Mr. Fry does have a go at trying to explain the not necessarily techie readers of The Guardian what that "cloud" might mean.

People often save data online in the ether or “cloud” simply by keeping it on their gmail or hotmail folders..... But many of us are beginning to dabble in true online applications and storage, in cloud computing. The advantage is that files can be created, stored and accessed from any online computer in the world. The network holds not only your files, but the applications that create them!

Yes, we're getting there. This is followed by the most well-known "cloud"-like services there are, such as Google, .Mac/MobileMe, zoho.com.
The one that's not mentioned, but which I knew through articles on backup methodologies for photography, is Amazon! Amazon provides online storage (their S3 product). I remember testing it as a decent technology, there were even user-space file systems for accessing your storage! But the only issue was my upload bandwidth. When it comes to broadband (although being the country with most dense cabling system country wide), Belgium is a bit retarded. The lack of decent competition means all sorts of limitations on uploads (bandwidth ànd upload-limits).
Amazon was obviously aiming at the bigger business as well as the home users and started providing quite a bit of storage (for a price, but hey you get rid of taking care of your own storage!).
Now there's one thing that Mr. Fry wasn't completely up-to-date about yet (and I forgive the man, you can't expect him to be aware of the latest in enterprise computing).

Enterprise systems will tend to hold applications and files on servers. A server is a dedicated storage and processing computer designed transparently to handle tasks for a network of individual “client” computers, the ones humans actually use.

Now Oracle has set the first steps towards enabling enterprise software on the cloud. As of today, you can create Oracle databases, Oracle middleware in the cloud, and even backup your databases on the cloud. All this through Amazon EC2 and S3 . Read all about it on: Oracle Cloud Computing Centre (do not miss the viewlet of how to install a database on the cloud)

With the markets plunging for the last couple of weeks, financial institutions have been suffering all over the world. Whether they had credit issues or not, the bad ones are taking the "not so" bad ones with them in their fall! After years of prosperity and the market consolidation through acquisitions, it's time for other stories.
IT has been trying to keep up with the ever changing demands. Until now, a lot of the demands were around integration. Integration of IT departments, IT systems, databases...
In the BeNeLux, Fortis bank has grown like that... out of banks in Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, Fortis had grown to a big player for the region. Recently, Fortis was split up in three different entities, and the Belgian entity has been bought by BNP Paribas.
So what about the IT? A lot of IT systems are present in Belgium (information from a blogger of the bank. source in dutch, source in french). And apparently, the Dutch entity cannot run its agencies nor home banking system independently from the Belgian systems. And as if things weren't difficult enough, the Belgian entity will have to be integrated in the French BNP Paribas entity which has been outsourced! I guess a lot of water will flow to the sea before this whole mishmash is sorted. I wouldn't dare to offer an immediate advice, not only out of sheer anxiety of taking the wrong decision, but also because this bank is a valued Oracle customer.
So if you face financial troubles in the near future, is your IT department agile enough to cope with diverging part of your business ànd/or merge with other businesses? Have you thought about it before reading this article? If so, are you scared. If not, are you scared yet?
Picture by Whimsical Chris