The concepts of Agile methodology and continuous delivery have become popular in software development, yet they are somewhat less mature among DBAs and database developers. Joyce Wells, editor at Database Trends and Applications (DBTA), spoke with Shay Shmeltzer, director of product management for Oracle Cloud Development Tools, to discuss how DBAs and SQL developers can take advantage of newer development approaches while also dealing with the unique challenges that exist in the world of database development.

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.

Check out this case study from Southern Utah University about how the university moved its entire infrastructure to the Cloud.

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!

Oracle’s new autonomous database service, the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud, deploys, optimizes, patches and secures itself, all without human assistance. This automation allows for greater performance and efficiencies and is what Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer is calling one of “the most important things” Oracle has done.  

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.