Recent Posts by Jeffrey Erickson

When Maria Colgan walked on stage at Open Mic night at a recent developer conference in Seattle, she knew the rules: no slides, 5-minute limit, demos encouraged. After four minutes and 54 seconds, she walked off stage to whoops and applause from 200 or so developers. Her simple demo? Spinning up an autonomous Oracle Database in the cloud, clicking on a new, just-announced list of built-in development tools, and starting a project. “People were sincerely excited,” says Scott...

As autonomous databases become part of large database estates, monitor and manage them with Oracle Enterprise Manager. By Jeff Erickson July/August 2019 At a recent Customer Advisory Board meeting on the Oracle headquarters campus, product managers listened to power users of Oracle Enterprise Manager as they shared their complex use cases and reacted to product roadmaps for Oracle’s flagship IT monitoring and management tool. One thing those product managers heard loud and clear...

A new dedicated service and the latest developer tools let more go autonomous. By Jeff Erickson July/August 2019 Even for people eager to use Oracle Autonomous Database’s self-driving, self-repairing, and self-securing capabilities, the question always comes down to this: Is it right for my workload? So Oracle has expanded the types of autonomous database services it offers to cover more use cases and at the same time provide more developer tool choices for building apps using...

Oracle is offering two new ways to take advantage of its Autonomous Database, and each in a different way makes things more interesting for companies wanting to move their Oracle Databases to the cloud.  The first is Oracle Autonomous Database Dedicated service, which lets a company run its databases in Oracle Cloud on physical machines dedicated only to their computing workloads. This setup matters to companies that have particularly high security, reliability, and control...

If you follow tech trends, you know that companies these days are often skipping the cost and hassle of operating data centers and instead using readily available cloud services. For many big companies, though, it’s a matter of using both models: finding ever-more ways to take advantages of cloud computing services while still keeping the best of their data centers. That’s the fuel behind Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine, which celebrates its 10th year in production, and the...

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...