Oracle Open World 2016 - My POV

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Oracle Open World 2016 was really amazing. It was already 1 month ago and only now I had some time to talk about it and Oracle trends for this year.

This is the biggest event in DBA area and was outstanding to be in a place with so many experts exchanging ideas!

So, there are a lot of different thing to talk here. It will try to make a summary..

• Oracle Security

This is the area I like most when talking about Databases. The more I study Oracle, the more I see how easy it is to attack it. I talked personally to the Oracle team (and their director) responsible for Database Security. Unfortunately they don’t seem to know the security breaches and exploits that are very easy to explore. I talked about some of the techniques that I’ve already used to gain and elevate privileges and I get impressed as the team responsible for security is made of people who are not deep inside about attacks at all. At least, Oracle 12.2 (coming probably on November) will have some good new security features.

This encouraged me to develop a 2-Factor-Auth (using mobile to generate passwords) for Database Authentication, which I’m currently working on. Also, as soon as I have time I will develop a Database Integrity checker to scan malware (as I can’t find any to download). Usually people thing that malware can only exist in OS layer, but anything that can run a code can have virus.

• Cloud, cloud and more cloud

Oracle is trying to push cloud into every client. Sometimes we feel that it’s only blah, blah, blah… everywhere is the same stuff.

The benefits are indeed very good, but usually for startups and small companies. Big companies already have a very huge costs with OPEX and Data Centers and would only take real advantage of cloud if they move everything to cloud. Otherwise, the costs of buying one more server is much less than paying for a cloud service. Also, to really beneficiate from cloud, the companies need also to change their policies and production workflow.

Private Cloud is a solution that I still like. It’s like creating a cloud inside your company and the benefits of better utilization of hardware is significant (like virtualization is). Another solution that is coming is "Oracle Cloud at Customer", where you can enable organizations to bring the Oracle Cloud Platform inside their own data center.

• Exadata

Exadata machine is awesome and is becoming even better with new features coming on, especially for DW envs. I saw a lot of presentations about best practices on deploying Maximum Availability Architecture on them.

They also released a new version of Exadata that is coming with Oracle SPARC processor (not Intel, their major partner). It seems to be 2x faster than the ones running Intel as the processors are customized and optimized to process SQL statements coming from Oracle Database. Let's see...

• Performance and Migration

I’ve also seen very good ways and best practices in upgrading or migrating to latest release of Oracle Database avoid any type of regression in query execution times. I’ve done it a lot of times already on my customers, but is always good to see and learn different approaches.

• Oracle Sharding

Oracle is coming with a feature called Oracle Sharding that in my opinion is like a mix of Hadoop and what Teradata did 10 years ago. It’s creating a way of escalating horizontally. With everything tending to big data, Oracle doesn’t want to stay away. It worth testing.

• San Francisco City

Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to know the city, as the convention was during all the day. I only visited the Golden Gate bridge on the last event day (and my last day). I should have stayed 1 or 2 more days just to say “I know San Francisco”. Maybe next time =]

Hope to see you all next year there!

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