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."

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 Summary 1 - General

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 is behind us.  It ran from September 28 to October 2. According to Oracle information, there were more than 60,000 attendees from around the world.

Before the memories about the OOW14 become blurred, I tried to summarize what I learned from the event. In general, the theme of this year OOW was about Big Data on the Cloud or Cloud over the Big Data.

Cloud

As I already predicted in my previous post before the event, in his opening keynote speech on Sunday (Sept.28), Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison spent most of time talking about Oracle cloud achievements and strategies. Oracle's cloud focus on PaaS and SaaS, which can help Oracle reach more small and mid-size companies and compete with other service providers such as IBM, Google and Saleforce.com.

Oracle has been working very hard to roll out an extensive set of PaaS services in recent years. Oracle is also making Oracle Database 12c as a cloud service (or called DBaaS). As Larry said, its "ISVs have been waiting for this" and its" customers have been waiting for this". Larry also claimed that 19 out of 20 largest SaaS products run on the Oracle platform except Workdays.

Regarding SaaS, Larry claimed Oracle has "the largest portfolio of applications in the cloud of anybody". while you were listening Larry's strong voice about Oracle's SaaS and criticism against its competitors such as Saleforce.com and SAP, your eyes couldn't catch all those names of cloud based applications in the slides showing on the huge screens behind him.

Overall, Ellison emphasized the extent of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, with 30,000 computers and 400 petabytes of data and supporting 62 million users a day. “Our cloud is bigger than people think, and it’s going to get a lot bigger,” Ellison predicted. “Our cloud strategy has been about building and buying.” Larry also told us.

Big Data

I did a summary about Oracle and Big Data back to 2013. But when people talk about Big Data, they usually think about companies like MapR, Splunk, cloudera, Hortonworks and MongoDB and don't think that Big Data can really work hand-in-hand with relational database. Oracle has been definitely working hard to make Big Data more accessible to its new and old customers and most of them have used Oracle relational databases. By introducing Oracle Big Data SQL, people can create external tables over Hadoop and NoSQL data stores and write SQL against them. So non-relational data can be accessed from within Oracle database using standard Oracle SQL. Oracle also expands its smart scan mechanism (used in Exadata Storage layer) into Big Data Appliance - pre-process data on the Hadoop cluster and move only the relevant data from Big Data world for further processing.

As an Oracle DBA, you will not have any excuses to shy away from Big Data by saying something like that you don't know Hadoop, MapReduce, etc. Oracle has made your work on Big Data much easier by using your existing SQL skills. Oracle can also help itself expand market share in Big Data market since those traditional Oracle DBAs normally have some powers on the decision to buy Big Data products.


Besides the cloud and Big Data, In-Memory option for Oracle 12c (available on 12.1.0.2, I will write post separately) was hot topic. It was not a new announcement in this year's OOW, but there were many keynotes and sessions talking about it.


Overall, Oracle OpenWorld 2014 brought Cloud and Big Data to all attendees' attention. Oracle is working hard on them, so should you.