Recent Posts by Jeffrey Erickson

Blockchain, IoT, and AI are here, but how do data experts use them in new business projects? By Jeff Erickson May/June 2019 Jerry Ward has always been a database tech geek. But for him the database was never an end in itself—it was a launchpad into interesting business use cases. “Even back when I was upgrading our company to version 6 of Oracle Database, I was also working on our build of Oracle Manufacturing and Oracle Financials in Oracle Forms,” he says. Today the regular...

Oracle Magazine asked Dominic Giles, a master product manager for Oracle Database at Oracle, to share a few of his top features in Oracle Database 19c. Automatic Indexing The Automatic Indexing feature uses machine learning algorithms to create and constantly adjust indexes to improve performance and cost savings. “For the first time ever, a database can determine for itself the optimal set of indexes for your dataset,” Giles says. That means “you can start the database without...

Pushing your company into promising new technology—while at the same time keeping the current, critical tech humming—is a maneuver best attempted with friends at your side. I think about this every year when I attend the Collaborate technology conference, a confluence of three major Oracle user groups where people who run big applications for functions like enterprise resource planning meet alongside those who write code or manage databases or build complex data center...

New features in Oracle Database 19c: A few favorites explained By Jeff Erickson March/April 2019 Oracle Database 19c has arrived, with new features that make Oracle Database even more useful for the daily work of running a digital business. Released on Oracle Live SQL in January 2019, Oracle Database 19c delivers long-term stability and an impressive set of innovations. There’s something here for developers, DBAs, data analysts, and security experts alike. Oracle Magazine asked...

A longtime database architect says there’s always opportunity in times of change. Right now, the time is ripe for those who can help AI do its job. By Jeff Erickson March/April 2019 If you’ve been in the database game as long as Kerry Osborne, you’ve gotten used to upheavals due to leaps in the technology. Osborne has built complex and ambitious database architectures for banks and telecoms in the midst of tech trends that have swung “from integrated solutions to best-of-breed...

Things you’ll do less of, and things you’ll want to do more of By Jeff Erickson January/February 2019 When technology turns a corner, as it has with the Oracle Autonomous Database, people who work with that technology rightly ask what it will enable them to do. With the self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing autonomous database services in Oracle Cloud, the question for DBAs becomes, instead, “What will it allow me not to do, and how can that make me more valuable?” This...

Not busy patching and backing up? Turn your focus toward database design. By Jeff Erickson January/February 2019 Anyone who’s worked with Heli Helskyaho—Oracle ACE director, EMEA Oracle User Group community ambassador, and author—on a database project or experienced one of her talks knows she likes to make things fun. That, she says, is one reason she’s excited about autonomous databases from Oracle. Autonomous databases take over the parts of her DBA work that worry her the...

In March 2018, Oracle delivered the world’s first self-driving database—a technology leap that’s been decades in the making, and that arrives just in time for the pressures and headaches of today’s business world.  “The pace of technology change will never again be as slow as it is right now,” said Accenture’s Chief Software Engineer Adam Burden, earlier this year. Companies expect data to be more secure, yet also more accessible. They want to scale up and down to...

An Oracle APEX developer presents the progressive web app approach. By Jeff Erickson November/December 2018 Just about any mobile phone user would rather click an icon to open an app full-screen than type a long URL in a browser. So web developer and Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX) expert Vincent Morneau went looking for a way for his web apps to deliver something closer to that native mobile app experience. He found it in a relatively new mobile publishing...