Every now and again I come across the question: How can we lower latency and speed up data delivery? Irrespective of the target database, the desirable answer for the person responsible for implementing the data integration strategy may be to employ parallel processing. However, in many cases the decision to parallelize is the best answer only if better options have first been exhausted, and organizations don’t always explore those options.

Oracle introduced the autonomous database in the Oracle Cloud this past March of 2018. It is set up for data warehouse-type workloads and not yet for heavy transactional systems or even hybrid-type applications. As a Database Administrator (DBA), we know that most of our applications have hybrid to heavy transaction workloads, and of course a few data lakes or warehouses. Well, good news — on August 7, 2018, Oracle announced and made immediately available Oracle 18c autonomous database in the Oracle Cloud for transaction processing.

In an age where increased productivity is the gold standard, DBAs continuously seek new ways to become more efficient in their daily work. Amazon Web Services (AWS), an IOUG partner, recognizes this need and recently announced two new features to reduce and optimize vCPUs on the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle Database.

Whether you’re an Oracle system/database administrator, an IT manager/executive or even just an end user/customer, security should be a key focus. Security breaches have happened at all levels within the industry. From the executive level to the end customer whose data is leaked, none of us want to be associated with a breach.

While you may or may not be considering a cloud migration or implementation of the Autonomous Cloud Data Warehouse via a Proof of Concept (PoC) or even a flushed-out roadmap, that activity is likely future looking or at best a work in progress. Security concerns are immediate, as well as future-facing.

So are there action items we can take right now? The answer is definitely yes!

This article, part three of a three-part series, explores Exadata storage maintenance.
Managing an Exadata Server is a great way to jump from being a normal DBA to great DMA (Database Machine Administrator), and get into the nitty-gritty details of storage administration. This tip will share some Exadata Storage maintenance jobs, how to manage them and at which logs to look.

In part three of this three-part series, learn about sharding in Oracle Database 12c Release 2 - the architecture and components, deployment, and management of the sharding configuration.

This talk is all about how an Oracle DBA has been using the Python programming language in his work and why Python might be a good language for other DBAs to use. There are hundreds of programming and scripting languages. Why Python? Also, database administrators are not full time programmers. Should they learn a programming…

This talk covers a real-world solution, that recreates database links using ORDS, REST and JSON. It breaks the limits of database links by loosely coupling two databases. The complexity is completely hidden from users and developers. Modern technologies such as REST and JSON offer elegant ways to couple databases without fixed dependencies. The protocol http(s)…

Database Security is important to understand and implement for data protection from insider and external threats. The cloud is another environment to make sure that the data is secure in the cloud and in transit. There are options and products available in the Oracle Cloud that can be utilized and DBAs and Security Professionals should…

Proper design of an application includes security plans, which ensure that specific data is available only to specific user groups. Application design should also include security plans for guarding against data or application tampering. These two aspects can easily be set aside while developers are caught up in the process of developing PL/SQL code to…