Recent Posts by Jeffrey Erickson

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...

Mark Rittman has taken a professional journey that gives him a unique vantage point on Oracle’s new autonomous database cloud services. He’s a CTO once renowned in Oracle analytics circles, who, after a change of firms, became steeped in the world of agile, open source-powered startups. And there he thought he would stay. Until he tried an autonomous database on Oracle Cloud. “I suddenly saw that I could bring that startup agility to any business,” Rittman says, who recently st...

Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud offers scale, security, and predictability, but without the DBA getting involved. By Jeff Erickson October 10, 2018 Mark Rittman has taken a professional journey that gives him a unique vantage point on Oracle’s new autonomous database cloud services. He’s a CTO once renowned in Oracle analytics circles, who, after a change of firms, became steeped in the world of agile, open source-powered startups. And there he thought he would stay. Until he...

If you can ask Apple Siri or Amazon Alexa to search databases for restaurants and obscure bands, why can’t you ask them to search or update the databases of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or human resources (HR) applications? This question, or something like it, crossed the minds of Jorge Rimblas and Christoph Ruepprich—both of whom are database developers and Oracle ACEs. But as data professionals, the question wasn’t academic. They each took the initiative to answer...

Data professionals connected back-office applications to voice assistants. Here’s what they learned. By Jeff Erickson September/October 2018 If you can ask Apple Siri or Amazon Alexa to search databases for restaurants and obscure bands, why can’t you ask them to search or update the databases of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or human resources (HR) applications? This question, or something like it, crossed the minds of Jorge Rimblas and Christoph Ruepprich—both of whom...

Here’s the problem: Executives greenlight a big project and developers are raring to work on it, but it takes days or weeks for IT to provision a database to get started. Or developers dive in, but use a cloud-based database that will never meet the functional, performance, and cost standards the company will need once the app goes into full production. Here’s the fix: Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Cloud Service now lets you order up a powerful, scalable Oracle...