The Hunger Site

Monday, May 29, 2023

A New Kind of DBaaS – Fully Managed, Multi-Database-Engine, Multi-Cloud to boot

(A thought leadership/opinion piece)
Author: Porus Homi Havewala
Cloud Database Consultant, Didgenet


When I was an Oracle Enterprise Manager SME working in Oracle Corporation some years ago, I had wished that the product would work with multiple database engines in the same superb way that it worked with Oracle databases. That never happened, but I was pleasantly surprised recently to find a brand-new cloud-based product was promising exactly that, and delivering it as well – a fully-managed, high-performance DBaaS (Database as a Service) for your choice of database engine – whether it be Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL, or PostgreSQL – and on your choice of cloud, whether it be AWS or Azure. Interested, I knew I had to take a further look.

I found that the same USA-based Enterprise Manager experts that had made it such a great tool for on-premise Oracle databases, had gone ahead and created Tessell – a company with which Didgenet, an Australian Indigenous majority owned business has recently partnered with in our part of the world. 

What this DBaaS product promises is a uniform and seamless experience for "any database on any cloud". The list of databases and clouds it supports is certainly going to expand, as per my talks with the founders. It also fills a gap by providing a fully-managed database service for Oracle and other database engines on Azure. There is a choice of deployment for the data plane – it can be hosted and fully managed by the product provider in their own cloud data infrastructure account, or hosted at the customer cloud infrastructure account, and fully managed in that case as well. So, as an example, let’s take a closer look at how it handles Oracle databases on Azure.

Multi-Availability Zone – High Availability (HA), and cross-region Disaster Recovery (DR) services are provided out-of-the-box, and this means that the product can easily deliver seven nines availability for mission-critical Oracle databases. And what about performance? If so required, high-performance Azure compute infrastructure such as Lsv3 with directly attached NVMe storage can be selected for mission-critical Oracle databases, to deliver up to 2 million IOPs with low latency. About the capacity, it can be large enough to suit your needs - up to 96 vCPUs, 768 GiB RAM, and 60 TB storage. For other Oracle databases with normal performance requirements, standard infrastructure such as Azure VMs and premium disks can be used.

The other benefit of a fully managed database service is that DBA time for day-to-day activities is considerably reduced. This is something close to my heart, having been a DBA since the 1990s. I always wanted to reduce or automate tedious manual DBA tasks, finish work and go home early (in the days before work from home). And this product will help. The DBaaS data plane provides an “Availability machine” that executes regular automated snapshots (minimum of 1 per day) and Oracle archive log backups (every 5 minutes), with 1-click recovery available to the DBA to recover a database up to the last committed transaction, or perform a point-in-time recovery, or recover from a snapshot of the database. Redo logs are multiplexed by default. This type of data protection and data availability allows zero data loss. Even logical backups (Oracle export dumps) used by many Oracle customers, can be created with a few clicks.

Database Patching is also an important DBA activity, and in this case patches for minor version upgrades are applied automatically. The DBA can select the patch version to apply, and then schedule patching, or patch straight away.

Importantly, the Availability Machine also enables masking, sanitization, and cloning of such data. Not many products do that. Data access policies can be created so that masked data can be securely shared with non-production environments such as development or UAT.  This is very important to protect personal confidential information in databases from data leaks in today’s day and age. As a matter of fact, some of my friends have been the victims of recent leaks, and this could have been avoided if masking of data had been enforced for UAT testing and development in the service provider where their personal confidential information was stored.

The DBaaS product can be used out-of-the-box, but is also flexible enough to allow customization in various aspects. You can bring your own software images, database parameters, keys, network and security settings, cloud account, licenses and even identity providers. And your existing databases, whether on-premise or on the cloud, self-managed or managed by another provider, can be migrated to the DBaaS data plane using the migration services provided by the company or partner.

Monitoring and Log visibility is out of the box. What I also understood was that the DBaaS product can be integrated with third-party software and services for observability, security/compliance, and data pipelines – including Oracle Enterprise Manager, Azure Monitor, Datadog, Splunk and others.   

All that certainly makes Tessell worth looking into, and it looks like partner Didgenet is ready to help in Australia.






Sunday, August 25, 2019

FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANY SAVES MORE THAN $2M IN ORACLE RELATED COSTS WITH VXFLEX INTEGRATED RACK

For four years, this financial services company had been running Oracle Exadata on their Oracle databases. During that time, database administrators managed the Exadata infrastructure themselves but as the environment grew to six Exadata systems they struggled to keep up with the day-to-day care and maintenance of those systems. Having experienced multiple performance inconsistencies, the lean IT team of eight people required the infrastructure team to become involved. It was then that the company realized the value and efficiency of utilizing HCI to improve current operations. With the Dell EMC solution that is described in this case study, the benefits included $1.8M reduction in hardware support expenses over three years, 13% decrease in core Oracle licensing and $455K savings in Oracle licensing support costs annually along with 12% performance improvement on workloads. Read the full report here: hashtag
https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/collaterals/unauth/customer-profiles-case-studies/products/converged-infrastructure/dellemc-financial-case-study-final.pdf  #iwork4dell


Friday, May 11, 2018

Dell EMC "Ready Bundle for Oracle"

The Dell EMC "Ready Bundle for Oracle" supports both production OLAP and OLTP along with test/dev environments in a single VMware virtualized environment. The high availability (HA) architecture and design built at every component level of the solution eliminates single point of failure and provides flexibility for planned maintenance downtime. 

Lower entry point with a purchase price up to 55% lower than the most advanced engineered solution for Oracle in the market, according to an internal cost analysis.

The Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Oracle has optimized Dell EMC VMAX All Flash storage, combined with VMware® virtualization, enabling consolidation onto fewer servers and storage arrays for lower capital expense (CapEx) and operational expense (OpEx).

Read more about the Bundle here: https://lnkd.in/fc3EY78


Saturday, April 21, 2018

Free Trial access to Oracle Licensing training portal

Dear Friends.

Here's a golden chance for Oracle professionals to get access to the Free, Trial training module on ORACLE LICENSING. My friend Sibaji Dey Choudhury has created this unique, comprehensive training portal on Oracle License Management, with an objective towards understanding Oracle's complex licensing rules, optimizing costs and avoiding non-compliance.

So, how do you get the Free, Trial access?

Step 1: Sign up on www.LicensingCircle.com (takes 1 minute)
Step 2: Request Free, trial access on the Contact Us page

I sincerely hope this will benefit all our readers and their contacts.

Best regards,

Porus Homi Havewala,
Oracle Certified Master.


Tuesday, February 27, 2018

From Gavin Soorma: Implementation Online Workshop Oracle GoldenGate 12c Release 3 (with Oracle 12c Release 2 RAC/ASM)


Based on popular demand, my friend Gavin Soorma and fellow Oracle Certified Master, is offering this brand new online training course combining Oracle GoldenGate with Oracle Clusterware and RAC/ASM. This course is the first of its kind and spaces are limited!

Learn how to install and configure your own two node Oracle 12c Release 2 RAC cluster environment and deploy a cluster-based highly available Oracle GoldenGate 12c Release 3 environment. Book your seat for the course by sending an email with your particulars to Gavin at his email address prosolutions@gavinsoorma.com , and registration details will follow shortly.

Course Duration: 24 hours (6 weeks)
Commencing: Sunday 11th March 10.00 AM US EST
Course Fee: 699.00 USD

Hands-on Lab Exercises with recordings provided of every session

Course Topics and Objectives:
Install and Configure Oracle 12c Release 2 Grid Infrastructure, ASM and Clusterware
Create an Oracle 12c Release 2 RAC database
Configure High Availability for Oracle GoldenGate using Grid Infrastructure Agent (XAG)
Simulate GoldenGate processing recovery from cluster node failure
Learn about the new Oracle GoldenGate 12c Release 3 microservices architecture, topologies and components
Installation of Oracle GoldenGate 12.3 Classic as well as Microservices Architecture
Configuring the Manager process
Prepare the Oracle database for GoldenGate replication
Create Classic/Integrated extracts and replicat process groups
Create Co-Ordinated /Parallel replicats
Configure and manage DDL replication
Configuring security and encryption of trail files and credentials in GoldenGate
Column mapping, Data filtering and transformation
Using the Logdump utility to examine trail files
Using OBEY files, macros and tokens
Handling errors and exceptions in GoldenGate
Configuring Automatic Heartbeat Tables
Monitoring Lag
Configuring Bi-Directional replication, Conflict Detection and Resolution, and new 12c Release 3 automatic conflict resolution

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Oracle Licensing bootcamp training in your city

Dear Friends, 

In the year 2018, our friend Sibaji Dey Choudhury is conducting 2-day "comprehensive" bootcamp trainings on Oracle Licensing in several major cities across the world. At the end of the intensive bootcamp training, you have the option of an assessment at no extra cost to get an "Oracle Licensing Maestro" certificate. 

Sibaji has 13 years of experience on "Oracle Licensing" training and consulting services, across 300+ customers worldwide.



If you are are interested in an "Oracle Licensing" bootcamp training in your city, please register your interest through the Contact page of www.LicensingCircle.com . Kindly mention your full name, email id and your city. 

Best regards, 
Porus Homi Havewala
Oracle Certified Master.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

NEW ORACLE 12C RELEASE 2 PERFORMANCE TUNING WORKSHOP BY GAVIN SOORMA

Dear Friends,

In 2018, we are very pleased to announce the upcoming new Oracle 12c Release 2 Performance Tuning Workshop.  This will be conducted by my friend Gavin Soorma who is an Oracle ACE Director, Oracle Certified Master,  and a highly experienced Oracle technology instructor.

Oracle 12c Release 2 Performance Tuning Workshop:
Course Duration: 20+ hours. This webinar meets 5 times.

Mon, Jan 22, 2018 12:00 AM - 4:00 AM AEST
Mon, Jan 29, 2018 12:00 AM - 4:00 AM AEST
Mon, Feb 5, 2018 12:00 AM - 4:00 AM AEST
Mon, Feb 12, 2018 12:00 AM - 4:00 AM AEST
Mon, Feb 19, 2018 12:00 AM - 4:00 AM AEST

Course Fee: 599.00 USD including a lifetime subscription to Oracle DBA Tips & Techniques website

Hands-on Lab Exercises with recordings provided of every session

Course Topics and Objectives:

Tuning Methodology
Using Automatic Workload Repository and AWR Baselines
Using Active Session History (ASH) Analytics
Using and interpreting ADDM including Compare Periods ADDM
Real-time ADDM and Emergency Monitoring
Tuning the Buffer Cache
Tuning the Shared Pool
Tuning sort operations and PGA
Managing optimizer plan stability
Adaptive Plans, Re-optimization and SQL Directives
SQL Outlines and SQL Plan Baselines
SQL Profiles
 Gathering and managing optimizer statistics
Gathering and managing histograms
Bind Variables, Cursor Sharing, and Optimizer Hints
Using SQL Performance Analyzer
Tuning using wait events
Optimizing performance by partitioning data
Indexes, Access Paths, and Join Operations
Tracing SQL statements
Automatic SQL Tuning
Generating and Displaying Execution Plans
SQL Monitoring
Creating and managing the Result Cache
….. and more!

Registration URL:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2592113343928404226

 Hope you enjoy the workshop.

Regards,

Porus Homi Havewala
Oracle Certified Master,
Oracle ACE Director Alumnus.

Disclaimer

Opinions expressed in this blog are entirely the opinions of the writers of this blog, and do not reflect the position of Oracle corporation. No responsiblity will be taken for any resulting effects if any of the instructions or notes in the blog are followed. It is at the reader's own risk and liability.

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