Oracle ACE = Oracle’s Bitch?

I got a comment today on my recent Oracle fanboy post, which I thought was very interesting and worthy of a blog post in reply. The commenter started by criticising the Oracle license and support costs (we’ve all had that complaint) as well as the quality of support (yes, I’ve been there too), but that wasn’t the thing that stood out. The final paragraph was as follows…

“One addition. I know you, your past work and you are very brainy person but since last couple of years you became Oracle doctrine submissive person just like most of the rest of ACE Directors. When you were just ACEs, you were more trustworthy than now and you weren’t just Oracle interpreters… And unfortunately I’m not the only person with this opinion, but probably I’m only one who is not affraid to make it public.”

I think that’s a really interesting point and one that I feel compelled to write about…

Let me start by saying I don’t believe this comment was in any way directed at the main body of my website. The articles there have always been “how-to” style articles and typically don’t contain much in the way of opinions about the functionality. I’ve always tried to keep facts in the articles and opinions and random junk on the blog. With that distinction in place, let’s talk about my blog…

When I first joined the Oracle ACE Program in 2006 I was very concious of what *I thought it meant* about what I could and couldn’t say. On the one hand I didn’t want to piss off Oracle as I was very proud of my little ACE badge, but I also didn’t want to be considered Oracle’s Bitch. I quickly learned a couple of things:

  • You are selected for what you are currently doing in the community. If you just keep doing what you do, life will be good. If you spend your whole time slagging off Oracle, you probably won’t get invited on to the program in the first place. If over time you turn into a complete hater, you will probably be asked to leave the program. I guess that’s pretty obvious and true of any evangelism program out there. Does that mean you can’t ever criticise Oracle? Hell no! Instead, I think it makes it your obligation to give constructive criticism whenever possible. One of the things we are encouraged to do is to make stronger links with the product managers so we can give more feedback to help improve the products. If you witnessed the amount of moaning and complaints that get fired at some of the Oracle teams during the ACE Director briefings, you would have no doubts about this. 🙂
  • The value of the Oracle ACE Program to Oracle is that it is made up of “real” people who think Oracle is cool enough to spend their own time talking about it. If the Oracle ACE Program becomes a collection of yes-men and yes-women, then they might as well send a bunch of sales people to every conference. Oracle have (so far), never complained or tried to veto anything I’ve said in any presentation, blog post or article.

So have I become one of Oracle’s bitches over the last few years? Well, I’ve been an ACE since 1st April 2006 (yes, April fool’s day) and I’ve been an ACE Director since some time in 2007 or 2008. I can’t really remember to be honest, but let’s say for the sake of argument it’s been 6 years as an ACED. If it was becoming an ACED that made me an “Oracle doctrine submissive person” in the last couple of years, it must have taken Oracle four years of work to make me that way. 🙂

I don’t believe I alter my beliefs to fit any criteria, but I guess it is really difficult to be subjective about yourself and I would be very interested to know what other people think about this. If I think about some common topics of discussion over the last few years where I don’t fall “on message”, they would probably be:

  • I believe Oracle is too expensive.
  • I believe the diagnostics and tuning pack should be part of the base product and available in all editions for free.
  • I believe anything to do with security should be part of the base product and available in all editions for free.
  • I don’t agree with the pricing of data guard standby nodes that are only used for managed recovery. If they are opened for use (read-only, active DG or snapshot standby) I can see why Oracle would want to charge.
  • Although I love the functionality of Cloud Control, I think the implementation is suffering from really bad bloat. It also exhibits some irregularities when different teams work on different aspects of the same functionality, as I discussed here.
  • I am a fan of certification from the perspective of personal development, but I don’t think the piece of paper is worth anything in itself. I’ve written about this here. Having said that, I do agree with the recent re-certification thing.

I’ve just had a look through my posts over the last year and if anything, I would say I’m promoting KeePass and MobaXterm more than Oracle. 🙂 I know I get a little gushy about the ACE Program during conference write ups, and maybe that annoys people a bit, but I just can’t see that I’ve become a total drone… (Denial is not just a river in Africa?)

Anyway, I have two things to say in closing:

  • To people in the Oracle ACE program : If you are worried about what you should and shouldn’t say, my advice is try to be as honest as possible. If the people in the community lose faith in the members of the program, then it is worth nothing!
  • To people in the community : If you honestly believe you see a change in behaviour when someone joins the program you should call them out on it. I would suggest you do this in private and give some examples of situations that give you concern. If they are “the type of people the program needs”, they should be concerned about this also!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. For those that feel the need to, please don’t wade in with comments in my defence as I don’t think this is either necessary or helpful. I think the person in question had a genuine concern and quite frankly that makes it a concern of mine also…

Roll up! Roll up! Nothing new to see here! (Database Web Services)

Over the years I’ve written loads of stuff about consuming and publishing web services directly from the database. I’ve been doing quite a bit of this at work recently and I realised how difficult it is to find all the pieces, since they are spread across multiple articles, spanning multiple database versions. In an attempt to give a single point of entry I’ve written this very brief article.

It’s really more of a links page. 🙂

If you are new to the idea of using the database for web services, it might come as a surprise what you can do without having to turn to the dark side (middleware). 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: This is new on my website though. 🙂

Oracle fanboy and blind to the truth?

I had a little exchange with someone on Twitter last night, which was initiated by him complaining about the cost of Oracle and predicting their demise. Once that was over I spent a little time thinking about my “fanboy status”.

If you know anything about me, you will know I’m an Oracle fanboy. I’ve spent nearly 20 years doing this stuff and the last 14+ years writing about it on the internet. If I wasn’t into it, it would be a pretty sorry state of affairs. So does that mean I’m totally blinded like all those Apple fanboys and fangirls? No. I just don’t choose to dwell on a lot of the negative and instead focus on the positive, like the cool bits of tech. The common topics I hear are:

  • Oracle costs too much : I could bleat on about the cost of Oracle and what features are missing from specific editions, but quite frankly that is boring. Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last 35+ years you should know the score. If it’s got the name Oracle associated with it, it’s probably going to be really expensive. That’s why people’s jaws drop when they find out Oracle Linux is free. They are just not used to hearing the words Oracle and free in the same sentence. If you want free or cheap, you can find it. What people often don’t consider is total cost of ownership. Nothing is ever free. The money just gets directed in different ways.
  • The cheap/free RDBMS products will kill Oracle : This talk has been going on since I started working with Oracle 20 years ago. It used to worry me. It doesn’t any more. So far it hasn’t materialized. Sure, different products have eaten into the market share somewhat and I’m sure that will continue to happen, but having a headstart over the competition can sometimes be a significant advantage. I work with other RDBMS products as well and it is sometimes infuriating how much is missing. I’m not talking about those headline Oracle features that 3 people in the world use. I’m talking about really simple stuff that is missing that makes being a DBA a total pain in the ass. Typically, these gaps have to be filled in by separate products or tools, which just complicates your environment.
  • It’s just a bit bucket : If your company is just using the database as a bit bucket and you do all the “cool” stuff in the middle tier, then Oracle databases are probably not the way to go for you. Your intellectual and financial focus will be on the middle tier. Good luck!
  • But company X use product Y, not Oracle : I’m so bored of this type of argument. Facebook use MySQL and PHP. Yes, but they wrote their own source code transformer (HipHop) to turn PHP into C++ and they use so much stuff in front of MySQL (like Memcached) that they could probably do what they do on top of flat files. Companies talk about their cool stuff and what makes them different. They are not so quick to talk about what is sitting behind the ERP that is running their business…
  • NoSQL/Hadoop/Document Stores will kill RDBMS : Have you ever had a real job in industry? Have you ever done anything other than try to write a twitter rip-off in Ruby for your school project? Do you know how long it took COBOL to die? (it still isn’t dead by the way). There is a massive investment in the I.T. industry around relational databases. I’m not saying they are the perfect solution, but they aren’t going anywhere in the near future. Good luck running your ERP on any of these non-RDBMS data stores! What has changed is that people now realise RDBMS is not the right solution for every type of data store. Using the right product for the right job is a good thing. There are still plenty of jobs where an RDBMS is the right tool.
  • The cloud will kill Oracle : The cloud could prove to be the biggest spanner in the works for many IT companies. If we start using cloud-based services for everything in the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, who cares what technology sits behind it? Provided our applications work and they meet our SLAs, who cares how many bodies are running around like headless chickens in the background to keep the thing running? For Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), I don’t think cloud makes so much of a difference. In these cases, you are still picking the type of database or the type of OS you need. They are not hidden from you like in the SaaS model. I guess the impact of cloud will depend on your definition of cloud and route the market eventually takes. What people also seem to forget is the big winners in the cloud game will be the big companies. When the world is only using SaaS, you are going to have to work for Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft etc. if you want to be a techie. The ultimate goal of cloud is consolidation and centralisation, so you will have to work for one of these big players if you want to be anything other than a user. I find it interesting that people are betting on the cloud as a way of punishing the big companies, when actually it is likely to help them and put us folks out of business…

The post has got a bit long an tedious, so I’m going to sign off now.

In conclusion, yes I’m a fanboy, but I’m not oblivious to what’s going on outside Oracle. I like playing with the tech and I try to look on the positive side where my job-related technology is concerned. If I focussed on the negative I would have to assume that Oracle is doomed and we will all die of Ebola by the end of the week…

Cheers

Tim…

 

Changing my focus? (Update)

The day before I left for OpenWorld 2014 I wrote a post called “Changing my focus?” where I talked about the possibility of dropping out of the forum scene and focusing more on writing. It’s now nearly 3 weeks later, so I thought I would follow it up to let people know what is going on…

Pretty soon after I left for OOW14 I locked the forums on my site. I had a touch of guilt, but also felt a massive sense of relief. At that point I was working on the basis I would leave them locked for OOW, then reassess when I got back.

While I was at OOW a lot of people came and spoke to me about that specific post and it seemed to be universally met with positive feedback. In some cases with messages like, “It’s about bloody time!” Everyone seemed to reflect my own opinion that the main value I can add to the community is to keep writing articles, rather than act like a “Let me Google that for you” service. Thank you to everyone for your support, especially those of you who gave me this advice several years ago! You know who you are. All I can say is you are much wiser than me. It takes a while to get into the right mindset so you can see the bloody obvious. 🙂

So what have I decided?

  • The forums are still locked and will remain so indefinitely. They are still available to view via the “Misc” tab, but I have removed the tab to them from the main website.
  • Blog comments are locked after 30 days. This alone has *massively* reduced the amount of spam I have to deal with.
  • I’m going to be very hard-nosed about dealing with people asking for help via other methods, like email and social media. The delete key is going to be used very extensively!

One of the things that really swung the balance was a comment made by someone who said, “The Oracle community is very selfish”. I won’t attribute that comment for fear of starting a flame war. 🙂 That is not to say the people contributing to the community are selfish. Far from it. But it does seem a section of the community is incredibly demanding, yet give nothing in return. Very soon after this comment was made, I received an email asking me what was wrong with the forum. The person in question hadn’t bothered to read the big red text on the page saying the forum was locked and hadn’t bothered to click the “read more” link that explained why. That kind of did it for me. I can’t deal with these zero-effort people any more…

I’m sorry if you are annoyed by this, but that’s the way it is going to be…

On the positive side, the time I’ve freed up has been put to very good use. As well as the new articles that are appearing on the front page of the website, I’ve written a couple of backfill articles on old features that somehow I’ve never written about before. I’ve also started to update the Oracle 12c installation articles so they are in line with 12.1.0.2. The OL5OL6 and OL6+RAC installation articles are complete. In all cases, there are hardly any changes, but the paths and images have been brought in line with the new version so people don’t get confused. The other installation articles are on the to-do list. 🙂

I’m also planning to start some beginner-style articles, like the one I did for PL/SQL. Quite light and fluffy, even by my standards. I guess this is really to appease my guilty conscience. 🙂 There are a number of areas I can think of that need this sort of introductory stuff before people can graduate on to doing the cool stuff…

So there it is. Onwards and upwards!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Recertification Requirement

I saw this post about the policy change this morning.

There is also a comment about it here.

You can be cynical about this and assume it’s a money thing, but I’m actually in favour of it. Red Hat have a recertification policy also. If you get your RHCE, you need to do another certification, even if it is just a one-off specialism, within 3 years or you lose your status.

In Oracle’s case, the recertification is based around retired exams, so it can be quite an extended time. If you take the 11g DBA certification, that’s been around for about 5 years and has still not been retired, so it will probably be around a 7 year recertification cycle for that exam. I don’t feel that is particularly excessive. Oracle’s release cycles seem to be slowing, so I don’t see this recertification being too much of an issue…

What this does mean is that people who did the 7, 8, 8i, 9i, 10g OCP and have never bothered to upgrade it should take OCP off their CV, but I doubt that is going to happen… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

JSON Support in Oracle Database 12c (12.1.0.2)

I spent a bit of time at OpenWorld looking at the JSON support in Oracle Database 12c. I started to write some stuff about it on the plane home and I spent the last two mornings finishing it off. You can see the results here.

I’ve tried to keep it light, since the documentation does a pretty good job at explaining all the variations of the syntax. I’ve also avoided trying to teach people about JSON itself. There is loads of stuff about that on the net already.

For the most part I think the JSON support looks pretty cool. During the process of writing the articles I did notice a few of things that I thought might confuse.

  • Using dot notation to access JSON in SQL seems like a neat solution, but each reference results in a query transformation that may well leave you with a whole bunch of function calls littered around your SQL. The end result is probably not what you want. I think it is probably better to avoid it and write all the direct function calls yourself, so you know exactly what the optimizer will do.
  • Typically the query transformations of dot notation result in a JSON_QUERY function call, but the optimizer can substitute a JSON_VALUE call if there is an index that it can take advantage of. That can be a little confusing when you aren’t expecting it. Once again, it might be better to avoid dot notation so as not to confuse.
  • If you are careful, the indexing of JSON data is pretty straight forward, but if you aren’t aware of how the query transformations work or you forget how very small changes in function parameters affect index usage, you can chase your tail trying to figure out why you aren’t able to use your indexes.

Until the REST APIs are released, the only way you can use this stuff is from the server side, so it’s not really something you can hand out to developers who are expecting to use just another document store. I had a play with the REST stuff during a hands-on lab at OpenWorld and it looked kind-of cool. When it’s released I’ll write an article about it and run it by some of the folks at work to see how they think it compares to other document databases…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 : Summary

OpenWorld 2014 was dominated by jet lag. Not that “special” type of Doug Burns jet lag, but the real stuff. As I mentioned in a previous post, having been ill in the 3 weeks leading up to OpenWorld, the jet lag hit me hard and I had nothing in reserve to get me through it. I’m now back in the UK and it is even worse. It’s 01:00 as I write this and I’ve been to sleep for about 3 hours. I’m now wide awake. It’s going to be a long day!

Apart from the jet lag, what was the overall message at OOW14?

Cloud

This one was pretty predictable. What broke away from the message of previous years was the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) message. In previous years Oracle said they were not interested in IaaS as competing with the general cloud providers, like AWS, was not good business. As Mark Rittman put it, this is “a race to for the bottom”. Instead, Oracle wanted to focus on the Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), where they are selling their technology stack and software respectively. This has much better margins and allows them to do something that other cloud providers can’t really compete with in a price fight.

In reality any PaaS provider needs to also provide IaaS because applications do not work in isolation. It may be nice to have your Oracle database on the cloud, but what do you do with that 3rd party application that you would like to run in the same data centre as the database?

Oracle have come out with a statement that they will provide general purpose compute power and not be beaten on price by the likes of AWS. That sounds quite scary, but I think the reality is this will only be a small part of their cloud business. I would imagine most people moving to the Oracle Cloud will be doing so for the PaaS and SaaS offerings. The IaaS will only play a supporting role.

In more general terms, Oracle are planning on adding just about everything “as a Service” on their cloud. They’ve announced Database Backup, Documents, Big Data (Hadoop) and Node.js as a Service, which were new to me, along with all the usual stuff we either already had or expected…

Once everything is available, it will certainly make an impressive lists. From a platform perspective, not quite as diverse as AWS yet, but impressive none the less.

Big Data

On the whole, Oracle shied away from the normal, “You can do big data with the Oracle database!”, message they’ve been trying to promote over recent years. I think the world and their dog understand that “Big Data” and relational databases don’t really go hand-in-hand.

Instead, Oracle were pushing the Oracle Big Data SQL product. I started off pretty cynical about this, thinking it would just be a knock-off of Cloudera Impala, but it does seem to be something more. Big Data SQL allows you to create external tables over Hadoop and NoSQL data stores, so you can write SQL against them and process the data in your Oracle database. No need to learn any new query/programming tool. It also allows you to join differing data sources together.

Regardless of your views on big data, there are a lot of “data people” out there with SQL skills and, relatively speaking, nobody with map reduce skills. That and the fact that many companies for the foreseeable future will be churning through their map reduce jobs to produce data to put into a relational database for reporting, means that integration between Hadoop, NoSQL and RDBMS will be a key component. Oracle Big Data SQL seems to have hit this nail square on the head. If it weren’t so ridiculously expensive, it would be interesting to see the adoption rate!

JSON Support

This might seem like a minor feature on the surface, but I think it is a massive step forward for Oracle. The reality of the marketplace is that document stores are now seen as the preferred solution for some situations. Oracle will never compete with the likes of MongoDB (it’s webscale) on shear performance, but how many people really need to hit those numbers? Last year my company were considering MongoDB/RavenDB for some HR projects. The main factor against this idea was the split of the “single point of truth” between Oracle and another database technology. If the JSON support in the Oracle database had been available, we would probably have used it.

The JSON support in the database seems pretty comprehensive to me. Once the REST APIs are available, through Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) it will be interesting to see how the developers react to this.

APEX 5.0

It was rather disappointing to hear that APEX 5.0 is a long way off going to production. The logic for holding back is sound. It’s got to be bullet proof, especially the upgrade process, so it’s better to wait until it is sorted, than release early and get lost in a support nightmare. Even so, I wanted the pretties… 🙂

WebLogic

I didn’t listen to the formal announcements about WebLogic, so I’m not sure how much of what I heard is still under NDA from ACE Director Briefing. For that reason, I’ll keep my mouth shut, but suffice to say, there are things in the pipeline that will make my life much easier!

Database

The database side of things was relatively quiet. Two years ago we got, “This is what we will give you in 12c”. Last year we got, “This is what we have given you in 12c”. This year we got, “This is what we gave you last year in 12c”. 🙂 We did of course get lots of In-Memory stuff, but we knew about that last year and it is now GA… 🙂

I guess some news was that we are 18-24 months away from 12cR2, so you will probably have to upgrade to 12cR1 if you want to retain support without paying any extra cash. The proposed release date for 12cR2 will be after the free 1 year extension to support runs out… When you consider the obligatory, “wait for the first patchset”, that could be a long time without support… (Doc ID 742060.1)

Everything Else

There were of course numerous things about Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, MySQL 5.7, Engineered Systems and a whole bunch of other stuff, but I guess if you follow those areas you already know…

Overall

As mentioned in a previous post, the take home message for me is that Oracle are working hard to be a cloud provider. As such, they have spotted obvious flaws in their own products. A big proportion of the new features in their infrastructure products seem to me like a direct result of them “eating their own dog food” while trying to become a cloud provider. I think this is good news for the future of Oracle products, even if you don’t care about the Oracle Cloud specifically.

Big thanks to the ACE Program and OTN for getting me to OOW14. It was great to meet up with my Oracle friends and Oracle family again. I’m looking forward to a jet lag free 10th anniversary OOW next year! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 : Wednesday

Another early start on Wednesday. I headed down to meet the Dbvisit gang for breakfast. FYI: I’m not paid to keep mentioning them and I don’t work for them. They are just a great group of people who I really like, so when I get a chance to meet up with them I do. 🙂

From there it was on to Moscone where I bumped into Eric Yen. We’ve known each other for years on the interwebs, so it was nice to spend some face-to-face time. I also bumped into Daniel De Meda again. We chatted for a while the previous day, so when we met today we did a selfie. From there it was off to the demo grounds again, then I met up with Sve Gyurov for lunch.

IMG_20141001_123115

If you’ve ever met Sve, you will realise that I am on tiptoes and he is crouching when we took this shot, otherwise this would be a picture of my head and his chest. 🙂

After lunch I had a major attack of lethargy, so I headed back to the hotel for a rest, which I’ve just surfaced from at 20:00. 🙁 I’m going to duck out of the evening events as well…

So this really marks the end of OpenWorld for me, because I leave tomorrow morning. It’s been a really strange one for me this year. I enjoyed the ACE Director Briefing and felt like I was coping really well, then I kind-of crashed once OOW actually started. What with being ill for the 3 weeks prior to the event, then having to deal with the jet lag, I really had no reserves to fall back on this year. I feel a bit disappointed with myself as it feels like a wasted opportunity, but you can only do so much…

I’ll write a wrap-up post about the whole event when I get back.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 : Tuesday

Tuesday started early with 5 hours in the hotel lobby. The plan was to catch up on my blogging using the free wifi. I hadn’t blogged for a couple of days, which prompted an email from my mom to see if I was OK. 🙂

It took about 5 hours to complete two blog posts, because every 30 seconds someone new walked by and I was “forced” to speak to them. 🙂

That done, I headed down to Moscone South to check out the Dbvisit stand. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had never tried a Twinkie, so Chris Lawless went to work correcting that state of affairs by bringing a box of Twinkies to their stand. You can see me trying my first Twinkie here!

I didn’t record me eating my second Twinkie. 🙂

From there is was a visit to the demo grounds again, then up to the OTN lounge to chat with a few people about the ACE Program, life the universe and everything. After a quick lunch with Vikki from the ACE Program, I hooked up with Steven Feuerstein to chat about his YesSQL initiative. Soon after that it was across to the ODTUG gathering briefly, before heading off to the SQL and PL/SQL Performance Panel, which featured Jagan Athreya, Dad (Graham Wood), Tom Kyte and Steven Feuerstein.

After popping back to the hotel to dump my bag, it was back down to Howard Street to the attend the evening festivities. I spent most of the evening with Doug Burns and one of his colleagues called Seamus. I even had a drink. Who’da think it?

Tiredness is still a big problem for me. The day is starting so early that I feel like the living dead most of the day.

Cheers

Tim…