Around this time last year we ran a story called “IOUG: Linux to be top platform for Oracle by next year.” Mark Brunelli had spoken with IOUG president Ari Kaplan about a survey of the organization’s members, which indicated that Linux was poised to overtake Solaris as the top operating system for Oracle DBMS deployments in 2007. Did these predictions bear fruit?

Unfortunately, it’s not clear. The IOUG conducted a similar survey this year, but they did not ask respondents the exact same question. Instead, members were asked to check all operating systems in use. Here’s what they reported:

1. Windows 509
2. Solaris 475
3. Linux 448
4. HP/UX 283
5. AIX 247
6. Unix 176
7. z/OS 42
8. Tru64 37
9. VMS 39
10. System I (iSeries,A/400) 14
11. No Answer 10
12. Other 9

Due to the wording of the question, we don’t know what the favored OS for the Oracle database currently is. It’s too bad – I became curious about predictions of Linux domination after reading a blog post by Marco Craveiro. With desktop Linux as well, it seems, domination is always just around the corner:

Well, three months into 2007 and very few mass migrations to desktop Linux have been announced. A few thousands here and there, but not the millions we all want. It’s beginning to look like our hopes for 2007 as the Linux Desktop Year ™ have been misplaced yet again. The algorithm for the Linux Desktop Year is becoming clear now: N + 1, where N is the current year. Yep, its always next year. What’s going on here? Are we never going to have Linux on the desktop? […] What about World Domination?

So is Linux’s big year ever really going to arrive? What do you think? Does your Oracle shop already run on Linux? Does it have plans to switch? Do you think Oracle-on-Linux will eventually have its day in the sun, or are the open-sourcers just dreaming?

-Elisa

I recently came across a survey done by Accenture a few months ago that drew some sobering conclusions about the data-rich yet insight-poor corporate environment of today.

Accenture surveyed 1,000 managers at large enterprises and found that:

• Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information and more than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them.
• Only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes to determine what data each part of an organization needs.
• 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just can not find it.
• 42% said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week.

The upshot: the terabytes of data that enterprises gather — and spend millions on storing, managing and analyzing — is bordering on useless for decision-makers. The cause for this sad state of affairs is the usual culprit: difficult to access, poorly-integrated and siloed data.

New integration technologies like SOA and master data management are rising to meet this need. BI is also evolving, converging with performance management to give managers better insight into business processes and trends.

But it’s obviously going to be an long, uphill battle — especially given that the majority of managers in the survey said that they store their most valuable information on their own computers or individual e-mail accounts!

Does this sound familiar at your organization? Any horror (or success) stories you’d like to share?  Or do you think — as one reader told me yesterday — that this survey is just a pretense to scare more people into hiring Accenture consultants?

Cheers, Tim

Last week we reported that a number of analysts think Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP is a serious and substantial thing.

One blogger at InfoWorld sees it differently. In a post titled “Oracle sues SAP for allegedly behaving like it has toward Linux,” Matt Asay announces that his first reaction to the lawsuit was “What a waste.” To boot, he claims that the lawsuit is essentially a case of the pot calling the kettle black — Oracle, he says, is accusing SAP of the same shenanigans it recently pulled on Red Hat:

Replace “SAP” with “Oracle,” and “Oracle” with “Red Hat,” and “illegal” with “legal but gauche,” and you’ll get a rough picture of what Oracle has attempted to do with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Rather than build up its own distribution, Oracle has opted to piggyback on Red Hat’s labor and brand. What it’s doing is not illegal — the key difference, perhaps, between what it alleges of SAP and what Oracle has done to Red Hat — but it’s still humorous.

But just how key is this “key difference”? As Asay admits himself, Oracle didn’t break any laws — Red Hat is open source. So can Oracle be fairly accused of hypocrisy here?

Asay also points out a few other takes around the Web, including that of Josh Greenbaum, who think this case illustrates how important third-party support providers are becoming: the announcement, he says, “highlights the effectiveness with which TomorrowNow is hitting Oracle where it hurts: right in the old maintenance fee.”

-Elisa

Big software companies like Oracle, SAP, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and others like to file lawsuits. It’s just a fact of the IT world. And oftentimes the lawsuits quickly fade away from the media spotlight, leaving folks to question whether they were frivolous, designed only to create negative PR for competitors. 

But despite that tendency, IT industry analysts are saying that there’s actually some meat to Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP.

In the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco this week, Oracle charged SAP with “corporate theft on a grand scale,” alleging that the German ERP giant stole a laundry list of Oracle’s copyrighted software and other proprietary information.

The 44-page complaint states that SAP wrongfully gained access to Oracle’s password-protected customer support systems and stole software products and other confidential materials, presumably, according to analysts, so that SAP could use the information to enhance the discounted support it provides to Oracle customers through its TomorrowNow arm. (SAP acquired third-party PeopleSoft support provider TomorrowNow following Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft.)

Michael Doane, founder and chief intelligence officer of Performance Monitor in Peachtree City, Georgia, read the complaint and says he believes the charges are substantive, believable and serious.

“There’s more smoking gun in here than I even would have dreamed when I opened the brief,” Doane said. “What it’s definitely going to do is be an enormous blow to the SAP brand, because this complaint is so substantive. It’s going to be a death blow to TomorrowNow. They’ll stay in business for now, but talk about crippled.”

The case against SAP is particularly unique because SAP’s alleged actions go way beyond the typical intelligence-gathering practices of major software competitors, said Martin Schneider, senior enterprise software analyst with The 451 Group in New York City.

“The fact that [Oracle claims] to have the IP addresses and the data coming from the Bryant, Texas, offices of TomorrowNow shows the charges have merit,” Schneider said. “If it’s something they are bringing up in a document I imagine it’s something they can furnish in court.”

Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP also shines a light on the fact that third-party maintenance is becoming a sensitive topic, says Ray Wang, a business applications analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. The reason, Wang said, is because any success by third-party maintenance providers gives one vendor an advantage over another by cutting off lucrative maintenance contracts — contracts that are becoming increasingly important to the likes of Oracle.

“Typically, the profit margins on third-party maintenance are in the 40% to 60% range towards the later years of the software lifecycle,” Wang explained. “We are in the same situation as the 1970s when IBM had a lock on all maintenance contracts for hardware.  Software companies are trying to do the same thing at the expense of customers who need to free up budgets to innovate.”

Wang added that SAP is having better luck at moving Oracle customers onto third-party maintenance contracts than Oracle is at moving SAP customers. (Oracle partnered with Systime for third-party SAP support.)

We want to know what you think about Oracle’s case against SAP. Is it as serious as Doane and Schneider say it is? Or is it just another of those cases that will fade from our minds with the next passing news cycle? And what do you think of third-party support vendors? Do they offer the same level of service as the initial software provider? Post your comments here and we’ll use them in upcoming SearchOracle.com and SearchSAP.com coverage of Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP. Let’s get a discussion going as this thing heats up.

– Mark Brunelli and Jon Franke, News Editors

An article published in Enterprise Systems at the end of 2006 predicted five major trends for enterprise IT in 2007, and the first one was Software as a Service (Saas). The article notes: “Joining pioneers Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and others, Oracle Corp., Business Objects SA, Informatica Corp. […] announced new SaaS offerings or expanded existing on-demand services.” SAP AG, Oracle’s arch rival in the enterprise apps space, wasn’t mentioned in this section.

According to IT blogger Nicholas Carr at Rough Type, that’s because SAP has for the most part dismissed rather than embraced SaaS as a model. He links to a CNET interview conducted last April in which SAP CEO Henning Kagermann deems on-demand a limited technology: “You can do this on-demand for certain areas and certain functions, but not for everything.”

SAP now seems to be singing a different tune. Kagermann recently touted the advantages of its suite of SaaS applications, codenamed A1S and yet to be released, as “game-changing” and “the better model.” This switcheroo, says Carr, is “spurred no doubt by his firm’s recent earnings shortfalls.”

Blogger Vinnie Mirchandani is more skeptical: “Read it closer, Nick. He means better model for SAP.” In other words, SAP’s latest claims about SaaS are just PR?

Matt Danielsson offers another take on where SAP stands on SaaS. “It seems SAP has made a 180 degree turn, going from ‘Bah!’ to ‘Wow!’ in just a year,” he says. But “it’s hard to predict the future when all you have is powerpoint slides and grandiose presentations. A1S might blow us away, or it could be another underwhelming experience a la CRM On Demand.” Only time will tell . . .

-Elisa Gabbert,
Assistant Editor

Attention DBAs: listen carefully to this tale of woe…

At the Alaska Dept. of Revenue recently, a “technician” committed not one, but two, serious errors: first, he mistakenly deleted over 600,000 customer records (which were scanned paper applications from state residents); second, he reformatted the backup drive!

 I’ll wait for the gasps and nausea to subside among you DBAs reading this.

But wait, it gets better. The department had a third line of defense: the data was also on tape. Lo and behold — you guessed it — the backup tapes were unreadable. Did I mention that the data was worth $38 billion (not million, billion)? The phrase “criminally incompetent” comes to mind. 

Believe it or not, there was a happy ending to this sad story. The “old school” backup was still available — 300 boxes containing the original paper applications. These were re-scanned and the database was reconstructed. It took 70 people six weeks to do this, to the tune of $200,000 in overtime.

The morals of the story are obvious:  1) have a backup and recovery plan that includes worst-case scenarios, 2) test your backups regularly and 3) check the references of “technicians” that you hire!

Cheers, Tim

Getting the most out of database storage management means keeping up with the myriad data storage tools, techniques and concepts that continually pop up in the IT marketplace.
 
It’s especially important for DBAs to keep up with best storage management practices because, according to the Independent Oracle Users Group, they’re the ones handling much of that workload these days. More and more, says IOUG president Ari Kaplan, the roles of storage manager and DBA are converging and this trend will have a significant impact on the future or both careers.
 
In this new SearchOracle.com podcast interview, I talked to Kaplan to find out about the forces at play which are driving a huge increase in database storage requirements, the converging roles of DBA and storage manager, and about the Oracle and non-Oracle tools that are available to help DBAs manage storage more efficiently. Kaplan also previews next month’s Collaborate ‘07 conference — one of the biggest Oracle user conferences of the year — where you can bet that database storage management will be a hot topic.
 
If you’re interested in learning more about database storage management, then this is the podcast for you. Download it today then let us know what you thought about it.

 – Mark Brunelli, News Editor

Shay Shmeltzer, who works with JDeveloper, devotes significant time every day to answering questions on the OTN discussion forums. He recently wrote a blog post called “10 Commandments for the OTN Forum Member” which lists ways to improve your chances of getting a solid answer to your question, as well as ways to become a positive member of an Oracle community.

Our Ask the Experts section on SearchOracle.com isn’t exactly a forum, but many of these rules still apply. You’re more likely to receive a response to your question, and a detailed one that will solve your specific problem, if you follow these guidelines of Shay’s:

• Give details about versions and technologies. What version of Oracle are you using? What’s your operating system?
• Give detailed error messages. It’s especially helpful if you copy the stack trace into your email.
• Search before you post. More often than not, the problem you’re having has already been addressed somewhere on the Web — on our site or one of the many Oracle forums out there. You’ll save yourself and our experts a lot of time if you try Google first.

Here are a few more tips to remember when posing a question to our of our experts:

• Post in the correct category. If you ask a migration question in the SQL category, it might never be addressed.
• Don’t post a question to an archived category. The experts for our “archived” categories are no longer taking questions, but you can still search their content.
• Try our learning guides too. You’ll find hundreds of expert responses organized by category in our learning guides, so try those to get instant answers to your questions. Our “Fast guide to solving common Oracle errors” is especially popular.

Thanks,
Elisa

Forbes reported a few days ago that database administration is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the United States. DBAs came in at #12, and are projected to go from 104,000 in 2004 to 144,000 in 2014, an increase of 38.20%.  

It should come as no shock that of the top 30 fastest-growing jobs, 17 are health care-related. (Number one is home health aides.) However, it was somewhat surprising that “network systems and data communications analysts” came in at #2, given automation and outsourcing. The latter reason likely accounts for the conspicuous absence of developers on the list. (Although they probably appear on India’s list!)

Forbes lists the current starting pay for DBAs as $43,605, which seems low. One hopes that as demand increases, salaries will follow. Still, DBAs have a long way to go to get to the best-paying tech job: SAP functional consultants (boo! hiss!), who earn an average of $163,000.

Database administration as a career has been on various “hot lists” for some time now, but blogger Venkat Devraj says that the real problem is the lack of quality DBAs:

“Sure there are lots of bodies around the planet, but there just aren’t enough qualified professionals to meet the growing requirements. People that not only can handle part of the job load, but those that can also communicate well with their users and peers. People that not only know the mechanics behind a task, but also what needs to be done and when to a database to meet user requirements and business growth. If these job growth statistics aren’t a clarion call for leveraging automation, I don’t know what is!”

This reminds me of the heated debate at an IOUG show a few years ago (Are DBAs really needed anymore?), in which automation was alternately seen as inevitable and irrelevant, or the cause of the demise of the DBA. Venkat clearly comes down on the former side:

News flash: database administration isn’t rocket science… and btw, even rocket science leverages automation in more ways than one can imagine… Wake up guys and smell the coffee. IT automation is happening in a big way. The companies that don’t embrace it will be relegated to the dark ages.

One thing is clear: if demand for DBAs continues to increase and supply can’t keep up, automation will play a larger and larger role in database and system administration.

Cheers, Tim

At one time or another, most of you have probably checked out the Ask Tom Web site. Like our own Ask the Expert feature, Tom Kyte’s Ask Tom site is a go-to when you’re stumped by an Oracle problem, like resolving an error or writing a complex SQL query. All the old questions are archived, and frequently, answers continue to be updated years after the questions were originally asked.

For example, in September 2005, an Ask Tom user, Alex, asked Tom the following:

I was wondering if there are some things you don’t like about Oracle? I personally wish more things came set up out of the box such as autotrace, intermedia text, scott schema etc. Any thoughts on this?

Tom named some gripes (he called for better error messages, for instance) and then wrote, “I’ll publish this to see what others add.”

Many, many Oracle users have added to the list since then. Some of the problems have already been resolved — one of the first to comment requested better cross-platform data file compatibility. 10gR2 now allows cross-platform full database transports with the same endianness.

The most recent complaint was added just a few days ago. Tim Kessler requested a polling option in SQL*Plus to continually execute a SQL statement for a given interval for monitoring functions.

What about you? What’s on your Oracle wish list? What bug slows you down? What one feature would make your life as an Oracle DBA easier?

-Elisa, Assistant Editor