Oracle 12.2 available on cloud first

“Amazon’s lead is over. Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward. And we’re very proud of our second generation of Infrastructure as a Service. We’re going to be focusing on it and aggressively featuring it not only during Oracle OpenWorld but for the remainder of this fiscal year and next fiscal year and the year after that.” said Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison in his opening keynote presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2016.

  

What about Oracle’s new second-generation datacenters? According to Larry, it will offer twice as many cores as Amazon, twice as much memory as Amazon, 4 times as much storage as Amazon, and more than 10 times the I/O capacity of Amazon. Not only that, in order to get your order, Larry also promised you will pay less (than that paid to Amazon).

Is Oracle still a database company? Yes. It still sells its Oracle databases including Oracle Database 12c Release 2, aka, Oracle 12.2. But this time, Larry told the audience, “You will see as we develop features for the cloud, we’ll also start delivering our software in the cloud first. Clearly it’s going to go on-premises, but the first deployment of our database and a lot of our software now is going to go to the cloud first.”No surprise, the latest release Oracle 12.2 was officially announced to be first made available in the cloud. By checking Oracle website, there is no schedule yet for the on-premises version.

As I mentioned in my another article, Oracle has been working hard to convince customers to move to the cloud. Under current strategy, it makes sense for Oracle to attract more customers especially new ones into its cloud service. With its new push into IaaS market against Amazon, Oracle will need more applications and software running on its powerful and cheap infrastructure including its own latest software like Oracle 12c database. By doing this, Oracle will not only demonstrate the new software’s features and functions, but also fully test and fix its new software before shipping its on-premises version.

If your company has used Oracle Exadata machine, you know Oracle had developed “secret sauce” (software function) just for its own hardware to gain more performance. We can then expect Oracle to run its own software much better on its own cloud infrastructure than on other cloud platforms like Amazon.

However, the majority of Oracle’s revenue still came from its non-cloud business. Unlike Amazon, who generated its cloud business revenue from zero (without any legacy non-cloud IT services), Oracle might experience some sort of pain when cloud service eating some of its existing business.

No choice. Amazon is there, so is Microsoft. Larry knows he has to win in the cloud. “Oracle competes at all three levels of the cloud, all three tiers of the cloud.” he said in his keynote speech.

Oracle runs to Cloud, where will DBA go? (3)

If you are an Oracle DBA (at least Oracle DBA in a typical company with IT department), can you think of your responsibilities?

You can easily Google the term "typical Oracle DBA works" and will get tons of results. I just pick up one from the top search result. From its "Oracle DBA Responsibilities" list, you will find lots of works done by Oracle DBA is to "create", "maintain", "install", "backup", "support" Oracle databases. I will also add "configure", "patch", "upgrade", etc.

Another chart below can also demonstrate the current "Top DBA Challenges" although the survey was a little bit old.

So, in the coming cloud era, what will be changed for the role of DBA? As said in "Cloud Considerations for DBAs", cloud "can alleviate the need for the administrator to install, configure, and provision the database. This enables the database to scale as needed." In other words, Oracle DBA will work less on the administration of Oracle database, at least the typical works of Oracle DBA.

Does it mean the companies will not need any Oracle DBAs if they build Oracle on the cloud?

About 5 years ago, Oracle Guru Julian Dontcheff already wrote an article - The role of the DBA in the Private Database Cloud.  His point is "The cloud will bring more challenges and need for DBA work to the enterprise."

Another recent article - Key Challenges Facing the Modern Database Administrator from Gerardo Dada, Vice President, Database Product Marketing and Strategy, SolarWinds gave more clear answers to the above question: "the cloud, DevOps, and other shifts in technology are making the entire IT department more application-focused. In the end, applications are what matters to the business and to end users. This means DBAs are being held accountable for application performance, not only database performance."

In the end, what will you do as an Oracle DBA in the cloud era? Oracle has some answers for you too.

When moving to the Oracle Cloud, Oracle DBA will need to understand:

• The overall architecture of the Oracle Database Cloud,
• How to migrate to the cloud,
• How to create an instance,
• How to configure connections,
• How to back up and recover databases in the cloud,
• How to use Cloud DBA tools.

For sure, the above list is not enough. As an Oracle DBA, your goal is to deliver better application performance (yes, application performance). So you will:

• Be proactive and align behind end-user experience as a shared objective across the entire IT organization by looking at application performance and the impact that the database has on it continuously, not only when it becomes a major problem.
• Measure performance based not on an infrastructure resources perspective, but on end-user wait times. Wait-time analysis gives DBAs a view into what end-users are waiting for and what the database is waiting for, providing clear visibility into bottlenecks.
• Keep the stability of databases just as other infrastructure teams or cloud providers striving on stabilizing their networks, hardware, software, etc.

Oracle runs to Cloud, where will DBA go? DevDBA. I replace the "Ops" to DBA in the popular word "DevOps". 

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 Summary 2 - Cloud

In the past OOW, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison only had one keynote speech. This time working a new role of CTO,  he delivered another one on Tuesday (Sept.30). He wanted to convince his customers by his passion on Oracle cloud platform, which was called by him a "brand-new, majorly upgraded" platform.

This new “platform 2014” services represent an extension of Oracle’s brand from one of “extreme performance” to one that also encompasses “extreme ease of use” and “extreme low cost,” said Larry.

Since he had said repeatedly that customers will be able to move databases and apps to Oracle's cloud "with the push of a button.", Larry personally handled the live, on-stage demonstration, in which he showed how easy it was for customers to move an Oracle Database 12c database (in the demo it contained the Wikipedia search data)  from an on-premises to cloud deployment and graphically displayed the query performance improvements enabled by the Oracle Database In-Memory option’s in-memory column format capabilities by using Oracle cloud management console. Later he quickly demonstrated a Java application moving to the Oracle cloud and running within a minute or so. As an article from Techworld pointed out, "Oracle's Enterprise Manager tool is involved on the back end, but it wasn't clear from Ellison's talk how involved it is to perform the initial setup between a customer's systems and Oracle's cloud." In other words, it was unclear how exactly Oracle technical support did behind that "button" (or automation).

Why did Larry push so hard to promote Oracle cloud platform? As I mentioned in my other blog, he expects that thousands of ISVs, hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of databases and applications will run on Oracle's cloud in the future.

Anyway, I would like to focus on Oracle Database Cloud Service, aka, Database as a Service (DBaaS)  given DBaaS is considered one of key offerings of Oracle Cloud services.

Oracle DBaaS gives you a complete Oracle database instance in a VM which is hosted by Oracle. As a customer, you have full access to that database and perform some database maintenance and all management operations by using cloud portal or command-line interface. You can even have root OS and SYS database access. You can also get full interoperability with your on-premises Oracle databases.

The main reasons to use database in the cloud are fast (in minutes) and simple (a few clicks) provisioning, cost efficient (pay per use) and more choices (different CPU, memory and storage, database versions, options, etc.).

The security is always one of key considerations for using cloud. Oracle DBaaS has rigorous security practices and procedures on different levels including account, user and database levels.

As we know, Amazon has provided the similar services since long time ago. Oracle is competing with Amazon and other service providers. The prices of Oracle DBaaS are from $400/month (standard edtion) to $5,100/month (Enterprise edition with extreme performance). You can even get Database Schema Service with the price of $175 per month only, but you can only get 5GB storage and 30GB data transfer per month.

As Larry said in his keynote about Oracle Cloud,  "We're just getting started."