This article, part one of a three-part series, explores a DBAs journey to APEX.

The frenetic pace of application development in modern IT organizations means it’s not unusual to demand an application be built with minimal requirement gathering—literally, from a napkin-based sketch—to a working first draft of the app within extremely short time frames—even a weekend!—with production deployment to follow just a few days later.
This article – the first in a series – demonstrates a real-life application development scenario: the creation of a mobile application that gives election canvassers a tool to identify, classify and inform voters in a huge suburban Chicago voting district – using the latest Oracle application development UI, data modeling tools, and database technology. Along the way, we’ll show how Oracle APEX makes short work of building a working application while the Oracle DBA leverages her newest tools—SQL Developer and Data Modeler—to build a secure, reliable, scalable application for her development team.

There are several methods used and developed over the years/decades since the Oracle Database has been around to migrate or clone your databases. Most of the methods have required us to use Data Guard or GoldenGate to achieve the same with minimal downtime or RMAN Backup files/Database Datafiles for regular cloning.

With the 12cR1 version of the database, remote cloning was introduced but still required to place the source non-CDB or PDB into Read-Only mode before initiating the cloning. With 12cR2, one has the ability to clone a database (also known as hot-cloning) without the restriction of read-only or downtime on the source. Also, hot-cloning can be achieved without an existing backup of the source.

Don't be afraid to look outside of your discipline. There is room to change and grow your career. Learn how Jonathan Gennick started as a programmer, became a database administrator, and ultimately decided to explore sales.

We’ve all been there. When the rubber meets the road, it seems like the database, operations and development teams are never quite in-sync. No matter how thoroughly executed, tested, documented and validated, something in the production environment is never quite the same as the lower environments – be it a hardware inconsistency, a code mismatch, or even the dreaded typoed command. To add insult to injury, code always seems to change between the time it leaves a developer’s laptop and when it is deployed to a mission-critical system.
Solving these issues is the primary motivator behind DevOps. Often misinterpreted as a buzzword endorsing development teams taking over platform and infrastructure roles, DevOps is all about development and operational modernization. Rather than operating as siloed, asynchronous teams as has been the norm for decades, DevOps represents a fundamental, holistic, organization-wide shift not only in processes and tools, but in people and culture.

As database environments evolve, so does the role of the database administrator (DBA). Take the movement to the cloud, for example. While it automates some tasks, like OS patching and backups, and frees up DBAs’ time, data governance, security and privacy become even more critical. And because businesses are demanding higher velocity at a lower risk, this ushers in a cultural change: DevOps, where developers and DBAs must collaborate more closely than before.

While migrating Oracle applications from physical to virtual OVM environments can be straightforward, it is important to take into consideration configuration issues regarding the interaction of the Operating System environment to the Virtual Environment. There are some gotchas that can complicate an installation despite assiduous attention to the installation and migration instructions. Figure 1 shows what a typical Oracle VM implementation may look like.

Over the coming weeks, SELECT and DBTA will be collaborating on a series of articles that have DevOps as their core theme. Like so many other buzz words in Information Technology today, there is no single agreed upon definition that has been set forth for DevOps, so the editors at SELECT decided that before we publish articles on DevOps, we should first describe what we view DevOps really means.

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.