Justin Kestelyn, the editor-in-chief of Oracle Technology Network (OTN), is perplexed — he wants to know why Oracle gets no blogging respect. Kestelyn recently complained on his blog that despite having a large blogging community, Oracle has very little street cred in the blogosphere.

At a recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, “even SAP” was mentioned as having a foothold in social media. Oracle, on the other hand, has a “complete lack of mindshare in this area,” he wrote. Oracle often gets credit for embracing new technologies early (like Linux in the past, and podcasting more recently) — why, he wonders, not in this realm? Maybe because readers assume that Oracle employees’ blogs must be clogged with marketing hype or somehow directed or controlled from above?

Blogger Robert Scoble suggests that it has to do with a lack of actual community building: “I can’t remember when they did what JD did — link out to people and join the conversation. I can’t remember getting an invite to any Oracle blogging event.” A commenter on that post and one blogger at IT-eye wonder if Oracle’s general lack of respect in this community is a function of its Unbreakable Linux offering. (Offend Linux fans and offend the geek community at large?)

I myself check in on the Oracle blogs every week; it’s another source of information adding to a fuller picture of what’s going on in the Oracle world, blogwise and otherwise. But I admit that I sometimes take what I read there with a grain of salt, and the commentary often comes off as a little, well, defensive.

-Elisa

Sure, you’ve had SOA (service-oriented architecture) explained to you a hundred times. And you always think you understand it . . . for about five minutes. Then it starts to get fuzzy again. (At least, this is how I felt for a long time.)

If you’re in the same boat, read yesterday’s entry on Peeyush Tugnawat’s blog. Tugnawat is a principal consultant with Oracle specializing in SOA and enterprise integration technologies. In this post he provides some “common sense” answers to the most frequently asked questions he encounters about SOA. These questions include:

• I have heard about it so much, but what exactly is SOA?
• What is a service?
• What is different about the service-oriented approach for enterprise integration?

Tugnawat explains the concept of “service” in a non-technical way. He writes:

Service means the performance of any duties or work for another. Service is provided by a service provider and consumed by the service consumer. Simple!

Think about it. We all use and provide services almost everyday in our day-to-day life. Following are some examples of well-known services:

Service Provider: Government
Services Provided: Education Services, Infrastructure Services, Police and Fire Services, Postal Services, and other regulatory services

He goes on to use the example of flight service to illustrate the terms service extraction, loose coupling and service orchestration. Click here to read the rest of his explanation.

-Elisa

Nadia Bendjedou, director of product strategy at Oracle, gave a presentation at last week’s Collaborate ’07 conference that listed 10 things you can do to get ready for Fusion applications as an E-Business Suite customer.

“We have announced lifetime support. That’s not just marketing,” Bendjedou said. “No one is going to push you to move to Fusion until you’re ready.” However, she said, many customers are asking what they can do now to prepare for the Fusion platform when it arrives.

Here are Nadia’s 10 tips:

1. Rethink your customization strategy: Take inventory and engineer for the future.
2. Consider master data management (MDM): Cleanse and consolidate your critical data early. Oracle’s Customer Data Hub technology is going to MDM.
3. Move to SOA-based integration: Bendjedou called this step the “core” of the presentation. The next generation of Oracle applications, she said, will be based on these standards for greater agility.
4. Extend your business intelligence portfolio: Oracle Daily Business Intelligence (DBI) is Oracle’s embedded BI product for E-Business Suite.
5. Adapt enterprise reporting and publishing: Bendjedou called XML Publisher a “no-brainer” choice for “high-fidelity” reports.
6. Secure your global enterprise: Your security strategy should include centralizing access control, ensuring data privacy and enabling compliance.
7. Consider grid computing: Grid computing offers resource pooling and sharing, low-cost modular hardware, incremental scaling, self-monitoring and –managing, security and high availability.
8. Centralize lifecycle management: Consider the Applications Management Pack for E-Business Suite. Use Enterprise Manager Grid Control.
9. Upgrade to R12: The latest E-Business Suite release offers a superior ownership experience, the greatest business insight and adaptive business processes, according to Bendjedou.
10. Prepare a Fusion project plan: “Get familiar as soon as you can with the Fusion technology,” Bendjedou said. She encouraged the audience not only to evaluate strategic business and IT drivers early, but to try out some “get-your-feet-wet projects.”

Click here to find out how you can prepare for Fusion if you’re a PeopleSoft customer.

-Elisa

OK, so maybe the headline is a tad misleading. I don’t actually have “20 must have PL/SQL developer tips” to list here.  But I can tell you where you’ll soon be able get them — thanks to my visit to the Collaborate ‘07 Oracle users’ conference at the Mandalay Bay in sunny Las Vegas.

During the conference I stopped by a session entitled “The PL/SQL Challenge: 20 Key Tips Everyone Must Know,” and I must say I was really impressed with the featured speaker, Joseph C. Trezzo, the president and chief operating officer of TUSC and the author of Oracle PL/SQL Tips & Techniques. Not only was he a good speaker, but he was clearly way smarter than me.

Trezzo said he’s labored for the last five years to come up with a definitive list of the top PL/SQL developer tips. He said he put the list together because there’s been so much PL/SQL change over the years that it’s tough to know what’s useful anymore and what isn’t. The list he compiled is made up of “the best” tips and scripts that work with both older and newer PL/SQL versions.

So my tip to you is this: Keep an eye on the white paper section of the TUSC Web site, where Trezzo says he’ll be posting the tips soon.

Here on SearchOracle.com, we’ve also got a great deal of useful content around PL/SQL development. Here’s a rundown of some popular articles and podcasts we’ve published on the topic:

• Oracle SQL Developer vs. Toad: Users speak out, part one
• Oracle SQL Developer vs. Toad: Users speak out, part two
• Oracle updates free SQL Developer
• Oracle unveils free SQL Developer: Has Toad met its match?
• Podcast: Expert says PL/SQL change needed in Oracle 11g
• Podcast: Oracle security guru Peter Finnigan on the problem with PL/SQL
• Oracle expert warns of weakness in PL/SQL

Enjoy!

– Mark Brunelli, News Editor

In a session this afternoon titled “Three trends in the Oracle world,” Rich Niemiec, funnyman and CEO of Oracle consulting firm TUSC, outlined what he saw as three major trends in general product direction for Oracle. For those of you who missed the session or couldn’t make it to Collaborate ’07 this year, here’s where Rich sees Oracle (and companies that use Oracle) going in the future:

• Grid computing and consolidation: Niemiec reminded us that RAC is embedded in the word “Oracle.” Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology is being adopted widely because it’s scalable and highly available.
  
• A shift toward Linux: Linux is Oracle’s fastest-growing platform. Why does Linux help RAC/grid? Because “Larry says so,” according to Niemiec. Larry Ellison sets trends and other companies follow.
  
• A shift to a mixed-resource model: Niemiec claimed that the trend in the ‘90s toward offshoring is lessening, and enterprises will begin to move to an IT structure that combines in-house departments, outsourcing and offshoring depending on size and other factors.
  

-Elisa

My, how Collaborate has grown! In only its second official year, the three user group combined conference is already up to 7,000 attendees from 50 countries. Let’s just hope that it doesn’t get as big as OpenWorld — although if Oracle keeps acquiring companies at its current pace, who knows?

The whole SearchOracle.com team is at the show, in America’s mecca of excess, Las Vegas.  Here are some random observations…

• The best session title: “What if Kramer was your DBA and Seinfeld tuned your database” by Rich Niemiec, former head of the IOUG and co-founder of the consultancy TUSC.
• The biggest laugh of the day was also in Rich’s session. I don’t recall the actual joke, but the punch line was “… and they never even use WHERE clauses!” Needless to say, there are plenty of Oracle geeks at this show. 
• Overheard in the hotel: “Just look into Carrot Top’s eyes. There’s just something wrong there. He’s evil.”
• Did you know that there are a whopping 400,000 Oracle Forms developers worldwide? That’s a heck of a lot of competition for job-seekers.  Chair of the Dallas Oracle Users Group – and stylish Frenchman — Emmanuel Delpierre offered his advice on Monday about how to market your “personal brand” to stand out from this crowd.
• One reason cited for the growth of Collaborate this year was the value that Oracle leadership increasingly places on it. For example, Oracle President Charles Phillips spoke Monday night and used the occasion to officially debut the new Application Integration Architecture (aka “Project X”). Of course, the free cocktails in the casino might be another reason for the show’s growth.

Stay tuned for more coverage of the show, including a podcast with author Mike Ault. In the meantime, here is a selection of other bloggers that are commenting on their Collaborate experience:

• Mark Rittman
• IOUG staff
• Floyd Teter
• Dmitri Gielis
• Eric Marcoux

If you’re blogging from Vegas, let me know and we’ll put up a link. 

Cheers, Tim

This morning at 8:30 was the second of the two keynote speeches at this year’s Collaborate conference in Las Vegas. (The first keynote was delivered on Monday by Oracle president Charles Phillips.) A little surprisingly, today’s session was led not by anyone from Oracle but by Mark Shearer from IBM. After brief introductions from the mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar B. Goodman, and the directors of events and conferences from the IOUG, OAUG and Quest, Shearer, the general manager of the System i server line at IBM, stepped onto the stage.

Tim, Mark and I wondered if Oracle and IBM would be making some sort of announcement at the conference. This didn’t seem to be the case; the main purpose of the speech was to broadly explain the nature of the ongoing relationship between Oracle and IBM and to demonstrate its success through a couple of case studies.

Shearer opened up by noting that user group meetings like Collaborate are “one of the greatest catalysts for innovation” in the industry. He then outlined his primary points, which included a focus on solutions for small and midsized businesses. In reference to the Applications Unlimited program, Shearer said, “You were excited 12 months ago, but you said, ‘The proof is in the pudding,’” and went on to claim that the program was proving successful with thousands of clients.

The presentation included two videos which summarized how Oracle and IBM had worked together on implementations. The first video centered on U.K.-based NHS, the largest employer in Europe. (The IBM-Oracle partnership “really does span the globe,” Shearer said.) The video outlined how NHS successfully overhauled its enormous human resources system with Oracle software on IBM hardware. The second video focused on how SNC Lavalin Profac, the largest Canadian outsourced services provider, moved its JD Edwards applications from Intel to the i Series platform, enabling greater scalability and reliability.

Shearer also emphasized Oracle and IBM’s concentration on providing products and services for specific industries, including banking, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, and on hosting/outsourcing.

-Elisa

Today marks the first full day of Collaborate ‘07, and the word of the day is overwhelming. The conference is huge, the hotels are huge, and the list of sessions is huge—if you can manage to decide which sessions you want to go to, good luck finding them!

Today after scrambling to grab lunch I caught a very interesting and interactive session called “What impact does automation have on the role of the DBA?” The session caught my eye because the description referred to an article our own Mark Brunelli wrote last year at OpenWorld: “Increased automation means changing roles for DBAs.” It also reminded me of our very popular article “Are DBAs needed anymore?” from back in 2005, which covered a similar session at that year’s IOUG Live conference.

Well, the question hasn’t gone away. And this panel discussion assembled a group of Oracle experts and DBAs, including Steve Lemme, an Oracle Master DBA and a director in the IOUG, and Dan Norris, a consultant working on Oracle DBA issues such as tuning and troubleshooting for 10 years, to address it. In general, the consensus among the panelists was that automation is a good thing—something to be embraced, not feared. Norris noted that many DBAs feel unnecessarily threatened as the Oracle product changes and their job roles inevitably change. “I don’t think there’s any chance of us being out of a job any time soon,” he said. Norris and the other panelists pointed out that we still need DBAs for what they called “firefighting”—what I took to mean high-pressure problem-solving and recovery. Automation, on the other hand, mainly addresses repetitive, “mundane tasks.”

Almost everyone agreed that DBAs spend the majority of their time on such tasks, like daily monitoring and statistics gathering. When such administrative work eats up most hours of the day, there’s less time, if any, for doing what Lemme called “the real work.” (Another panelist quipped that DBA stands for “doing business after hours.”) One audience member said, “I don’t think we’re realizing the benefit of all the automation already out there.” Another disagreed, claiming that only about 20% of what he does in a day can really be automated anyway. The panelists mostly sided with the first DBA, stating, “We tend to say, ‘Oh, that cannot be automated,’” thinking most tasks are too complicated, when in reality they can. Lemme said that one of the “key challenges” of automation is “breaking your current cycle”—DBAs have to realize that once they give it a chance, and put in the initial time and effort needed to figure out how to automate certain daily tasks, the “ultimate result” will be better for everybody.

DBAs, what do you think? Do you worry that increasing automation will suck the life out of your job? Eliminate it completely? Or does automation just give you more breathing room to perform your job better? What tasks are the best candidates for automation? Which of your job functions will never fall into that category and always need real people?

Thanks,
Elisa

Only four days and counting till Collaborate ’07 kicks off in fabulous Las Vegas (an upgrade from last year’s setting of Nash Vegas). As usual the whole SearchOracle team is going to be there to bring you full coverage of the show, including breaking news, fresh database and applications tips, and up-to-the-minute reports right here on the blog.

As of Monday, you can search the full list of sessions available from the IOUG, OAUG and Quest. I hope you’ve got some time on your hands — there are thousands! And lots of them sound very promising. Here are a few that we’re going to try to attend:

• How to keep yourself marketable in a down or up IT market
• What impact does automation have on the role of the DBA?
• Ten things you should NEVER do in PL/SQL
• Seven deadly SQL traps and how to avoid them
• Cool tools I use: Demonstrating useful PL/SQL and SQL programming tools
• Oracle 10g for the very new DBA
• E-Business Suite customers: 10 things you can do now to prepare for Fusion
• What’s the fuss about Fusion? SOA and Oracle
  

Check back with us during and after the show for coverage of these and other technical sessions, the keynote presentations and more. And if you’re going to be at Collaborate, and you see Tim, Mark or me wandering around, stop and say hi!

See you in Vegas!
Elisa

As enterprise Oracle DBAs know first-hand, data growth these days is exponential. Gartner calculates that the average site doubles its data under management every 6 to 18 months. Terabyte-sized data stores were a novelty not too long ago but you’ll soon be hearing more and more about petabtyes. That’s 1,000 terabytes. One million gigabytes. A lot of data.

A petabyte is a difficult concept to comprehend. Consider this:

• A petabyte of data is the equivalent of 250 billion pages of text, enough to fill 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets. Or imagine a 2,000-mile-high tower of 1 billion diskettes.
• For comparison, the U.S. Library of Congress, with 130 million items on about 530 miles of bookshelves — including 29 million books,  2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs,
  4.8 million maps and 58 million manuscripts — can be stored on only 10 terabytes.
• A single sequential scan through a megabyte takes less than a second, but at 10 MB/s it would take over a year to complete such a scan through a petabyte.
• It would be faster to send a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by sailboat than over a megabit per second internet connection — indeed, it would take over 250 years!

For this post, I began compiling what I thought would be a short list of petabyte-sized data collections (not necessarily single databases) to show what was on the horizon for DBAs. To my amazement, the list went on and on, for example:

• Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
• National Center for Atmospheric Research (who also just installed a massive 12 teraflop (12 trillion calculations per second) IBM supercomputer, with 4 terabytes of memory!)
• CERN particle accelerator
• National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (Uses a Cray XT4 supercomputer with 19,344 CPUs, each with 2 GB of memory!)
• San Diego Supercomputer Center
• National Security Agency (which apparently keeps a record of every phone call made by every single person in the United States.)
• The Internet Archive
• Wal-Mart
• Walt Disney
• Fair Isaac
• Google
• AOL
• Yahoo
• Hotmail
• MySpace 
• YouTube (streams approx. 200 TB/day, or 6 petabytes/month)

I soon gave up compiling an exhaustive list (email me at tdichiara@techtarget.com with your suggestions). Are petabyte data stores really the new normal? Not quite, but we’re getting suprisingly close. 

In all, the world has seen the amount of data grow from 5 exabytes in 2003 to 161 exabytes in 2006, according to IDC. The world’s storage systems can no longer store all of the data being created. This year,
the amount of information created and replicated (255 exabytes) will surpass, for the first time, the storage capacity available (246 exabytes).

Database and storage admins: your jobs are safe!  (Edit: Or maybe not. MySpace has NO storage admins for its petabytes.)