Oracle OpenWorld 2014 Summary 3 - Big Data

Before attending this year's OOW, I hadn't paid much attention on Oracle TEAM USA winning 34th America's Cup on San Francisco Bay in 2013. But I did know the story about Larry Ellison skipping OOW keynote for America's Cup sailing last year.

While we know Larry spent more than $150 million on his two sailing boats, we might not know how Big Data helped Oracle TEAM USA won the race. According to the article from Forbes, "Each of its two boats had 300 sensors recording 3,000 variables up to 10 times per second, pumping 30,000 variables per second into an Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Sailors were outfitted with bombproof electronic tablets, wrist displays and Skipper Jimmy Spithill had a heads-up display linked into the on-board wi-fi system to constantly monitor performance and loads on the boat’s components. Comparing boat against boat during training sessions, both the Oracle and Kiwi teams were able to calculate optimal performance in any conditions. All that data gave sailors a second-by-second picture of how well they were doing relative to how well they knew the boat could perform during races."

So for OOW this year, before you could enter into the exhitition halls (Moscone South and North), you would see Oracle TEAM USA's winning AC72 catamaran parked on Howard Street. I had also got chance to take pictures with the shining trophy and sign the posters by winning team sailors.

Since Larry had taken advantage of Big Data on his own team, how would he sell Big Data to his customers?

On September 30, Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s executive vice president of product development, delivered his keynote speech focus on three major trends in business and culture—big data, mobility, and the cloud. Regarding the Big Data, Kurian introduced a new set of tools called Oracle Big Data Discovery. “It’s the visual face of Hadoop,” Kurian said.

As we all know, Hadoop is a big data platform for many companies, but is also not familiar to many professionals including Oracle DBAs because it requires expertise in a programming model called MapReduce. Oracle Big Data Discovery is a single, easy to use product, built natively on Hadoop to transform raw data into business insight in minutes, without the need to learn complex products or rely only on highly skilled resources. By using Endeca (Oracle’s data discovery engine), it lets users profile, explore, and analyze Big data as well as do prediction and correlation. “With Oracle Big Data Discovery, you will be able to explore and find patterns and problems with your data,” Kurian said.

Combined with Oracle Big Data Discovery, Oracle also brought attendees attention on newly introduced Oracle Big Data SQL. Through Big Data SQL, non-relational data on Hadoop and NoSQL databases can be accessed from within an Oracle Database using standard Oracle SQL. To lots of Oracle developers and DBAs, many of whom are pretty fluent in SQL but much less so in the technologies used to access data on Hadoop – this makes Big Data very accessible. Big Data SQL also includes a unique Smart Scan service that minimizes data movement and maximizes performance. This mechanism is similar to the smart scan facility in Exadata Storage Cells.

Like Exalogic for Middleware following successful Exadata for database, Oracle brought another appliance - Big Data Appliance. This is a specialized appliance that is an 18 node Hadoop cluster in a machine with full rack configuration (including 864 TB of raw storage capacity, 288 cores, 64 GB memory per server).The InfiniBand included in Oracle Big Data Appliance plus the storage and core design of the appliance will enable enterprises to eliminate network bottlenecks for a Hadoop cluster. The appliance includes software often required in big data projects, such as Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager for infrastructure administration; Oracle Linux, the Oracle JDK, the Oracle NoSQL Database (Community Edition) to support advanced analytic queries; and the popular open source R statistical development tool.

Whether to build Big Data project or buy a Big Data appliance, Oracle has both available for its customers. Because Oracle TEAM USA could win America's Cup with Big Data, will Oracle also win his customers to use Oracle Big Data?

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."

Prepare for Oracle OpenWorld 2014

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 is fast approaching. This will be my first time to join this event. I will fly from Toronto to San Francisco on September 27.

Except the registration, hotel and flight booking, the most important preparation work was to schedule the sessions to attend during the event by using Schedule Builder.

There are 2027 sessions (by 3214 speakers) listed in Content Catalog. Which sessions should I choose? A big headache. I don't know how other attendees normally pick the sessions, but I chose the sessions mainly by speakers who I am interested in. As you can also see from the topics, they are mostly relate to Oracle 12c or performance tuning.

Here are some of those speakers and their sessions:

• Using Oracle Multitenant to Efficiently Manage Development and Test Databases by Alex Gorbachev - CTO, The Pythian Group Inc.
• Near-Zero Downtime Database Migration by Arup Nanda - Database Architect, Starwood Hotels  
• Adaptive Query Optimization by Christian Antognini - Senior Principal Consultant, Trivadis AG  
• Reading an Automatic Workload Repository Report by Jonathan Lewis - Sole Proprietor, JL Computer Consultancy  
• Top Five Things to Know About Oracle Database In-Memory by Maria Colgan - Master Product Manager, Oracle  
• How to Upgrade, Migrate, and Consolidate to Oracle Database 12c by Mike Dietrich - Senior Principal Technologist, Oracle  
• The Best New Oracle Database 12c Features by Rich Niemiec - Executive Advisor to the International Board, Rolta International Inc.  
• Expert Oracle Exadata: Then and Now by Tanel Poder - Technology Evangelist, Enkitec  
• What’s New in Oracle Database 12c Release 12.1.0.2? by Tom Kyte - Architect, Oracle  

For sure, I will watch the keynotes by Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd.