Excellent points made by Tim G, Jeremiah W and Mark F (as usual, the
Oracles have spoken, and spoken truly and wisely!)
We will always continue to see inflection points in this industry. At the
end of the day, IT is about "how to spend $1 in technology to save $10 in
human based processes", and anything that enables this paradigm (or even
implies about enabling this paradigm more efficiently and at lesser cost
then before) will be adopted. Here are some high level observations
(entirely mine):
1. Intel based X- series servers are way more cost effective, and better
performant, compared to SPARC/Itanium/PowerPC based servers of the past
generation. So many organizations are using Hardware EOL opportunities to
replace them. (This is just to address the question asked earlier, as we
took a digression in this thread)
2. If you are a commercial enterprise using Outlook, and are using the old
"email servers local to your Datacenter", i.e not using Microsoft's Office
365 in the MS Cloud, your CIO probably needs to be replaced or re-educated
:-) Gmail (and other cloud based email services) essentially drove this
trend and everyone else followed quietly. What this meant was that your
local IT does NOT need to manage, operate or scale Outlook - all of this is
done by Microsoft, and the industry gave this treasure trove away with nary
a peep (those who followed the recent US elections know the value of emails
handled incorrectly :-). Granted, moving Outlook/Email to the cloud is much
easier than moving Databases/Oracle to the cloud (see next).
3. Database based applications need to be physically located right next to
the Database - Such applications are typically chatty (they make multiple
round trips over the wire (network) to the database for every request) AND
they are very latency sensitive AND they need to be immediately consistent
with the interaction, i.e. human user facing applications typically needs
to respond to user input within a few seconds at most, preferably less than
a second, for the application to be usable. Herein lies the great challenge
in moving enterprise applications to the cloud - you CANNOT keep the data
in your local datacenter (i.e. hosted on your choice of hardware managed by
YOUR SysAdmins running Databases managed by YOUR DBAs) AND host the
application (code, connection pools, etc.) in a remote Cloud provider's
data center that is more than 1 ms away on the network, primarily because
of the cost of network round trips and latency requirements. SO if you want
to place applications in the cloud (because you can get compute reasonably
cheaply in the cloud), you also need to place data in the cloud (right next
to it).
4. So what sort of database based applications CAN be placed in the cloud?
To answer this, consider a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) type application
such as a pure vanilla Oracle ERP (Oracle E-Business Suite). As long as
other pieces of your IT that either produces this data (humans using the
ERP screens, and in some cases machines that produce data) or consumes this
data (Data Ware House / Analytics) can be "eventually consistent" (i.e. the
immediate interaction with the data is in the order of seconds but the
"batch" type interaction can be minutes or hours), it is quite easy to use
this application in the SaaS model via the cloud, and over the Internet. In
fact, Outlook 365 (OL) is such an application - a human composes an email
(local to that human's PC and not immediately consistent with the OL server
in the cloid), and the PC sends/receives email asynchronously with the OL
in the Cloud, and as long as you have a good network pipe to the OL server,
you are good. No need to maintain the OL servers in house, no need for IT
people to run these servers and the service - everything is outsourced to
Microsoft Outlook 365 service (who are doing an excellent job btw). Same if
you use the commercial version of Gmail (G-Suite by Google).
5. So how about PaaS and IaaS for databases? Tim G wrote an excellent
answer in this thread above, and I don't need to add anything else...
6. So what does this mean for you, as a DBA? Mark F provided the right
answer. It is not the technical skills alone that the DBA is useful for,
and you can no longer hide under the surface in the bowels of the system -
Your value is in the knowledge of other, peripheral skills such as Data
Modeling, Application data knowledge, design of interfaces, data
extraction, transformation and re-use, provide sound guidance and direction
to Developers, etc.
7. At the risk of repeating Tim G - "data is the only thing with value". As
a DBA, it is your job to organize, manage, protect and operate technologies
that are used to store and retrieve data, regardless of whether it is in
the cloud, on Oracle or on other database technologies. You get paid for
using your skills to this efficiently and to the advantage of your
enterprise.
8. So how about running Oracle RDBMS on the Oracle Cloud vs running Oracle
RDBMS on a non-Oracle cloud provider? My understanding is that Oracle RAC
and the underlying storage support (as well as Exadata as a named, specific
service) is available only in Oracle while the others can operate Oracle
databases as a non-RAC, limited storage based application. This is getting
better, but I have not heard anything convincing from the others...
(Jeremiah - Care to add here?)
Having said all this, personally, after having worked on (and still working
with) Oracle RDBMS based products and applications for the past three
decades (since Oracle 5.1.17 to be precise), I also work with a multitude
of NoSQL technologies thanks to where I am right now. I bring my technical
knowledge and expertise to these technologies the same way I did this for
Oracle, and believe me - they are not easy as it seems.
I brought some of these aspects into my presentation at a recent NoSQL
conference - which was recorded so easy to distribute and watch :-)
if you are interested, take a look at my "Operating NoSQL at Scale" talk at
Couchbase Connect 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEP_2DFrYG4 ;(and a
previous one on use of Couchbase at an enterprise such as eBay at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gc7lXotQ1E&t=34s)
Regards,
On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 10:37 AM, Reen, Elizabeth <
dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Alfredo,
No you are not being paranoid. There is more of my career
behind me than in front of me. I started off as a DEC Basic programmer
(Dec/Vax Basic has no relationship to MS Basic). I moved on to become a
Sys Admin for RSTS, VMS (Vax and Alpha), Windows servers, the DEC Unix
flavors, HP UX, Solaris, and then I was turned into a DBA. The database is
just another O/S to me. I took a job as an Application DBA. This is where
I think the profession is headed. Databases don’t need the amount of care
that they once did. Application code is not being produced to the old
quality standards. Knowing how to tune sql will always be needed.
My masters is in system engineering. Learn how things work
and changing O/Ss or DBs is just a matter of learning a new syntax.
My $.02 (I miss the cents sign)
Liz
Liz Reen
Long suffering DBA
*From:* oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@
freelists.org] *On Behalf Of *Alfredo Abate
*Sent:* Friday, December 16, 2016 11:59 AM
*To:* mohammed.bhatti1@xxxxxxxxx
*Cc:* mwkillough@xxxxxxxxxxx; Dennis Williams; tim.evdbt@xxxxxxxxx;
oracle-l-freelists
*Subject:* Re: Oracle DBA to PostGreSQL DBA?
Mohammed it's funny that you mention that because I was seriously thinking
that myself the other day. Is my career as an Oracle DBA in a few years
going to be comparable to that of the COBOL programmers?
For me I got started very early as an Oracle DBA (21 years old) but I
still have a way to go on retirement. Makes me wonder what other areas of
IT I need to branch out into and skill sets I need to add.
Perhaps I'm just being paranoid. :)
Alfredo
On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 10:48 AM, Mohammed Bhatti <
mohammed.bhatti1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Are we really getting that old? Begs the question, have we become the
COBOL programmers of the 21st century???
--
mohammed
On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 11:44 AM, Mike Killough <mwkillough@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
That's a good point. I think that once there are no more premises
databases, I will hit the retirement finish line anyway.
Mike
------------------------------
*From:* Dennis Williams <oracledba.williams@xxxxxxxxx>
*Sent:* Friday, December 16, 2016 10:39 AM
*To:* tim.evdbt@xxxxxxxxx
*Cc:* mwkillough@xxxxxxxxxxx; oracle-l-freelists
*Subject:* Re: Oracle DBA to PostGreSQL DBA?
All - I just saw an article stating that most companies are migrating to
the cloud, so using the databases easily available and supported by the
cloud company.
Dennis Williams
