DBA 3.0 – How to Become a Real-World Exadata DBA – IOUG Collaborate 2015

According to a Book of Lists survey, 41% of people’s biggest fear is “public speaking”.  To put that into perspective, “death” is the biggest fear for 19%, “flying” for 18% and “clowns” don’t even register (which does make me seriously doubt the survey’s credibility).

I gave my first public presentation at IOUG Collaborate 2015 last week in Las Vegas and I didn’t die.

Why did do make your presentation debut at the second largest Oracle event on the calendar?  Excellent question.

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Oracle’s Critical Patch Update for January 2015

Oracle announced their Critical Patch Update for January 2015 today.

The CPU includes a fix for this troubling exploit in E-Business Suite found by David Litchfield where EBS grants index privileges on the (SYS-owned) DUAL table to the public role by default.

The database exploit with the highest Homeland Security threat level is CVE-2014-6567 which could allow for pre-12c databases on Windows to be “entirely compromised”.  If you’re not running pre-12c databases on Windows, the threat score is noticeably reduced, but still a 6.5.

In other news, 12.1.0.2.3 is out, should you live your life on the bleeding edge of technology.  Quarterly Full Stack Download Patches for Exadata are referenced in the availability note but don’t yet link to public documents; no doubt they will soon.

SSL 3.0 is disabled by default in Java SE – thanks to POODLE (really), it’s now considered obsolete and SSL as a whole should be disabled as organizations “can no longer rely on SSL to ensure secure communications between systems”.

Quite a scary world out there, huh?

MOS reference notes: 1935468.1, 1942215.1

2014 Gartner Hype Cycle

Gartner’s 2014 Hype Cycle was released earlier this month and shows, unsurprisingly, that Big Data and Cloud Computing are some way from reaching the prized “Plateau of Productivity” rating.

New Features of Oracle 12c Database Release 1 Patch Set 1

“NO RELEASE 1!!!”

I admit it, I’m one of those “no Release 1” bigots when it comes to new versions of Oracle’s RDBMS.

I know dogma is not meant to have its place in technology, but I have gone through far too much suffering in previous x.1 implementations to believe that it really is different this time, promise when Oracle try and persuade people to upgrade to their latest Release 1.

Oracle have been claiming that “this NEW version is rock-solid, man, none of the old teething problems” since 9.1, so it’s difficult for those DBAs who don’t enjoy pain to make the leap instead of waiting until the second patch set of the second release before starting on their upgrade planning.

HOWEVER, the latest patch set for Oracle 12cR1 was released this week and, BOY, does it have a lot of really cool features.

Oracle Database In-Memory

Oracle today announced their in-memory database option: Oracle Database In-Memory (ODIM).

Not to be overly dramatic (but…) – if this is for real, this could be a very big deal indeed for Oracle. I was somewhat unconvinced by some of the pre-release hype, but it looks like it might have been justified.

The performance improvement potentially dwarves the difference that Exadata made when it arrived on the scene. Of course, this was a super-slick presentation from Larry Ellison and the proof is always in the pudding. However, there are some SERIOUS players in the industry who are confirming that this IS as good as it sounds, if not better.

Oracle’s “Nightmare”?

Over the last six weeks or so, I’ve been voraciously reading about Big Data, NoSQL, Hadoop and other emerging data management technologies which are clearly The Next Big Thing™ in IT. Personally, I find it fascinating to learn/think about how we will integrate different volumes and scales of data – both structured and unstructured, big and small – to give our organizations a clear, competitive edge in their industries.

As with all Next Big Things™, there are a lot of tremendous blogs and white papers written by some extremely smart and insightful people – and there are a lot of articles in “trade mags” which do nothing but fuel the runaway hype.

Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud vs. Engineered Systems?

I listened to an Oracle webinar on “The Value of Engineered Systems” yesterday. It didn’t really cover anything ground-breaking from my point of view, but it offered the following facts or thinking:

It should be noted that I’ve spent my career as a Oracle (relational) DBA of some description, so I’m sure there’s some degree of bias. However, I’m an advocate of Oracle databases because they’ve proven to be the best on the market.

• There will be an estimated 50 billion Internet devices by 2020.
• 90% of all data in the world has been created within the last 2 years.
• An estimated 50x data growth is expected by 2020 thanks to the Internet of Things, Social Media, surveillance
• An estimated 340 trillion IP addresses will be required by 2020 – I hope SOMEONE is using IPv6 by then!
• IT departments need to grow by 4% per annum just to maintain existing systems, excluding any growth of business needs – yet companies continue to make cuts in infrastructure and avoid investing in R&D.
• Storage accounts for 17% of IT budget.
• Oracle do NOT expect customers to host their PRODUCTION systems in the PUBLIC Cloud – they see customers to host PRODUCTION in a PRIVATE Cloud (either hosted by the customer or via co-lo) ***
• Instead, they expect SaaS for Development to be the big draw for the PUBLIC Cloud.
• Engineered systems simplifies IT.
• Oracle is awesome.
• Exadata is awesome on steroids.