Oracle News Desk

Oracle Wheels Out Its Big Data Appliance Ahead of Schedule

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:30:00 EST

In a surprise move on Tuesday, January 10, Oracle wheeled out its Big Data Appliance. That’s the one it said in October would be ready sometime in the first half. Only nobody believed it meant early in the first half. Heck, it’s not even clear anybody thought Oracle could make the first half at all and it probably couldn’t have met so early a date if it hadn’t been secretly closeted for months with Cloudera. It’s using Cloudera’s version of Hadoop in the thing rather than lose time dicking around rolling its own. Cloudera is the oldest, most established of the Hadoop start-ups whose ranks now include MapR (tight with EMC, its Greenplum database and the EMC Data Computing Appliance) and Hortonworks (buddies with Microsoft and SQL Server 2012) and it’s assumed to have more customers and more experience than anybody else. Observers say Oracle’s use of Cloudera shows it’s serious. Big Data is supposed to be a $70 billion industry growing at maybe 20% a year and Oracle wants more than its fair share so it’s not letting any grass grow under its feet. To prove it’s serious, Oracle is low-balling the highly engineered system. Rather than charge millions like it does for its Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics appliances, Oracle’s Big Data Appliance will go for a mere $450,000 a rack with maintenance on both the hardware and software running only 12% a year. The price is a third less than expected. For the money customers will get a full rack of 18 Sun Fire x86 servers with 216 CPU cores, 864GB main memory, 648TB of raw disk storage, 40 Gb/s InfiniBand internal connectivity and 10 Gb/s Ethernet connectivity, perfectly sized for the greatest number of customers. Users also get Cloudera’s open source Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager software, Cloudera’s Google Big Table-ish HBase, an open source distribution of R, the programming language, the Community Edition of Oracle’s NoSQL Database, Oracle’s HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and Oracle Linux, the Oracle fork of Red Hat. The widgetry can be used in multiple ways. Oracle and Cloudera are going to split support, with Cloudera getting the hard software questions. Oracle’s also got a bunch of separately priced connectors so users can integrate data stored in the CDH Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or Oracle NoSQL Database with Oracle Database 11g. The four connectors cost $2,000 per server processor. Betcha Oracle figures it can up-sell Big Data Appliance users on Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics since everything’s tightly integrated. It’s also possible that Oracle might want to buy Cloudera eventually depending on how things go and how its vision of itself as a database company morphs. Currently they’re bound together by a non-exclusive multi-year alliance. A huge win for Cloudera, the start-up is reveling in the validation it’s getting from Oracle and all the feet Oracle can put on the street. It can probably anticipate an uptick in its consulting and training business. It also figures the Oracle ecosystem will produce new tools, applications, systems and services in support the CDH platform.

Cloud Expo New York: The Java EE 7 Platform - Developing for the Cloud

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.

Oracle to Spend $1.9 Billion Buying Taleo

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:25:00 EST

Oracle rolled out of bed Thursday morning and said it’s going to buy Taleo and its talent management cloud widgetry for $46 a share or roughly $1.9 billion net of Taleo’s cash and debt. That’s an 18% premium. Not bad for a company that was originally bootstrapped. Taleo (say Ta-LAY-oh) competes with SuccessFactors, which SAP is buying for $3.4 billion, and its stock price fattened up after the SuccessFactors deal was announced in December on speculation it would be taken out by Oracle. Taleo is supposed to handle more SaaS transactions than anybody except Salesforce.com.

Oracle to SAP: ‘See You Back in Court’

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

As predictably as the sun rising in the east, Oracle Monday rejected the slashed $272 million award for damages that the presiding federal court judge decided it should get from SAP for its admitted copyright infringement rather than the $1.3 billion the jury awarded Oracle in late 2010 following a captivating and highly publicized trial. Oracle told the court it wants the new trial it was offered to “vindicate” the jury and its property rights as well as to avoid risking its right to appeal the court’s decision. SAP, which agreed to pay a $20 million fine to the US government to avoid criminal prosecution, said it was “disappointed.” Calling the jury award “grossly excessive,” Judge Phyllis Hamilton last September found Oracle only proved actual damages of $272 million. SAP’s third-party maintenance arm TomorrowNow illegally downloaded reams of Oracle software and customer-support documents before it was shut down in 2008.

Google Loses Appeal to Suppress Evidence in Java Suit

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington Monday punctured Google’s hopes of hiding the telltale Lindholm e-mail from the jury when Oracle finally drags Google and Android before the bar to answer charges of infringing its Java copyrights and patents. The appeals court sided with the district court that has already told Google six times that the highly compromising e-mail couldn’t be suppressed. Neither court bought Google’s story that it was an artifact protected by attorney-client privilege that was turned over in discovery to Oracle by mistake. The appeal court found that Google engineer Tim Lindholm “was responding to a request from Google’s management, not Google’s attorneys.” It said the message concerned a negotiation strategy, not a legal strategy and “does not evidence any sort of infringement or invalidity analysis.”

An Enterprise Cloud for Business-Critical Applications

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:45:00 EST

For enterprise class cloud services, companies need a broad, comprehensive and flexible platform for their applications. Oracle recently announced the Oracle Public Cloud, which offers a broad set of best-in-class, integrated services that are elastic, secure and manageable, offering organizations choice in development and deployment of business critical applications. In his opening keynote at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Tyler Jewell, VP, Product Management & Strategy, Oracle Public Cloud, discussed how the new services can speed your application development and deployment time, while maintaining a low cost infrastructure and the ease with which you can access, use and manage them.

Many Clouds, Many Choices

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:45:00 EST

As enterprise adoption of cloud computing accelerates, organizations must have a strategy and plan for moving to the cloud. What should you put into public clouds? Should you create a private cloud? Should you use cloud applications, platform or infrastructure? How should organizations get started on the road to cloud computing? In his general session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Rex Wang, Vice President of Product Marketing at Oracle, explored best practices for how organizations can move to cloud computing.

Judge Blocks Oracle’s Appeal in SAP Case

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:00:00 EST

Oracle can’t appeal the judge’s decision to cut the $1.3 billion jury award in its suit against SAP to a mere $272 million unless it rejects the $272 million, the judge told Oracle last Friday. Oracle is trying to avoid the other option the judge gave it, which is a new trial. If Oracle rejects the $272 million, there would be a new trial and then it could appeal the judge’s decision. The judge contends Oracle only proved actual damages of $272 million when SAP’s now defunct TomorrowNow third-party maintenance subsidiary illegally downloaded reams of Oracle software. Reuters, which reported the decision, said the order did not indicate if Oracle could accept the $272 million and then appeal, but an IP lawyer the wire service talked to said probably not. If SAP appealed to the size of the judge’s award Oracle might be able to try for the $1.3 billion.

Oracle v Google Java Trial Up in the Air

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:15:00 EST

Last week Oracle’s long-simmering Java infringement suit against Google, already postponed from Halloween, was scheduled to go to trial “on or after March 19.” On Thursday the court entered another order saying it won’t set a trial date any time soon and suggesting that given the demands on its calendar it could be 2013 before the case gets heard. Presiding Judge William Alsup, who figures, speaking “from experience,” that the trial will take two months, also said in his order that “The court will not set a trial date until Oracle adopts a proper damages methodology, even assuming a third try is allowed (or unless Oracle waives damages beyond those already allowed to go to the jury). For this ‘delay,’ Oracle has no one to blame but itself, given that twice now it has advanced improper methodologies obviously calculated to reach stratospheric numbers.”

Oracle Fusion Applications - Installation and First Impressions (Part 5)

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 12:15:00 EST

Oracle Forms and Reports is one of Fusion Middleware components needed for OFA installation. Forms is a GUI tool used to develop, generate and run database front end applications. Reports is a GUI tool used to develop, generate and run database reports. For the purposes of Oracle Fusion Applications installation we will secure Forms and Reports with Identity Management. Once you download and unzip Oracle Forms and Reports software and run installer you will be presented with the welcome screen.

Oracle Fusion Applications - Installation and First Impressions (Part 6)

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:40:09 EST

Oracle HTTP server is one of Oracle Fusion Middleware for Oracle Identity Management components. Oracle HTTP Server provides HTTP listener services for Oracle WebLogic. Once you download software ( it is a part of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Media Pack; HTTP server resides in Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Tier Utilities 11g DVD ), unzip it and run installer you will be presented with welcome screen.

Oracle Fusion Applications - Installation and First Impressions (Part 4)

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:49:12 EST

Oracle Identity Management is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware and part of the Oracle Fusion Applications infrastructure. Its purpose is to manage user identities across the enterprise. We are going to install Oracle Internet Directory 11g (OID), Oracle Virtual Directory 11g (OVD), Oracle Identity Manager 11g (OIM), Oracle Access Manager 11g (OAM) as well as two instances of Oracle Database (11.2.0.2) - one for the Identity Store and the other for the Policy Store. SOA Suite is first component to be installed since Identity Manager requires it. Some SOA Suite components (Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager ) require schemas to be created in middleware repository database. We created separate database to contain Oracle Identity Manager schemas.

Oracle v Google Java Trial Kinda Sorta Scheduled

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:45:00 EST

Oracle’s long-simmering Java infringement suit against Google, postponed from Halloween, has been scheduled to go to trial on or after March 19, according to case tracker Florian Mueller. It’s not the firmest date ever and to Oracle’s chagrin, federal Judge William Alsup has decided that the proceedings will be in three parts with a single 12-man jury deciding first Oracle’s copyright infringement charges, then its patent infringement claims, and finally any damages Google might owe and the extent of its willfulness. Oracle wanted to present all its evidence at once. It was also hoping the trial would start this month. Google, on the other hand, wanted to push it off until at least the summer. Florian says Wednesday’s order doesn’t hold out the possibility of a stay to accommodate a re-examination of five Oracle patents-in-suit by the US Patent and Trademark Office. But that doesn’t mean, he says, that Judge Alsup, who wishes Oracle and Google would settle their differences and go away, couldn’t issue a stay before the patent part of the trial starts. The jury will also be told a re-examination is in progress including the PTO’s prior art concerns and its initial findings of invalidity. However, despite a string of Google appeals, it will also be told about the compromising Lindholm e-mail in which a senior Google staffer told Google’s supreme command it needed a Java license, a piece of evidence for infringement as well as damages that the judge has previously considered damaging. At this point Florian figures that the judge realizes “the best chance to get the parties to settle is a reasonably firm trial date and, possibly, a ruling on the copyright part of the case. Once the copyright phase is over, the possibility of a stay of the patent liability part may be on the agenda once again.” Otherwise the court’s gonna need 12 jurors with well-padded bottoms and the ability to recall testimony from in a previous phase.

Oracle Fusion Applications - Installation and First Impressions (Part 2)

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:02:12 EST

In the second article of the Oracle Fusion Applications installation series we are looking at Repository Creation Utility which populates transaction database with OFA schemas. The Oracle Fusion Applications Repository Creation Utility (Applications RCU) creates applications-specific tablespaces and schemas. According to the OFA installation manual: The Applications RCU loops through all the middleware components in the component definition file and applies the relevant ones to the database. For each component, the Applications RCU creates the appropriate middleware tablespace and schema user. After creating the schema user, it defines the tables, views, and other artifacts that the schema owner owns.

Book Review: Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:30:00 EST

If you want a well rounded introduction to JAVA 7, look no further. This book touches on all the things you would expect in an introduction to a programming languages. The book is broken down into six parts and a set of appendices. I have listed the chapters by part below. Part I: Getting Started- Becoming a Programmer, Writing Your First Program, Vacationing in Java, and Understanding How Java Programs Work. Part II: Learning the Basics of Programming- Storing and Changing Information in a Program, Using Strings to Communicate, Using Conditional Tests to Make Decisions, and Repeating an Action with Loops. Part III: Working with Information in New Ways- Storing Information with Arrays, Creating Your First Object, Describing What Your Object is Like, and Making the Most of Existing Objects. Part IV: Programming a Graphical User Interface- Building a Simple User Interface, Laying Out a User Interface, Responding to User Input, and Building a Complex User Interface.

Oracle Misses Badly, Spooks Everybody

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:49:00 EST

Oracle zigged when it was expected to zag Tuesday and came in with a nasty fiscal Q2 miss that caused its stock price to buckle close to 10% after-hours for fear the results are a harbinger of the broad-based tech slowdown everybody’s afraid of given the newspaper headlines, especially out of Europe. Oracle in its conference call never once said it was, claiming instead that Q2 was a one-off event and that “short of a global meltdown” Q3 “won’t be a repeat.” Obviously there was a struggle to close deals in Q2, which ended with the hateful November. Ellison, Catz and Hurd are three pretty slick articles, still it’s hard to believe that the company didn’t already have the management controls in place to monitor last-minute approvals but that’s what Catz said. Approvals came through – lurchingly and apparently with more, higher-up signatures than they used to need – and Oracle has had to figure out how to deal with that wrinkle going forward. Apparently any deals missed are expected to close this quarter. Both its Q2 revenue and earnings were short of consensus. It reported earning 54 cents a share, up 6%, on revenues of $8.79 billion, up 2% year-over-year, when the Street thought it would do 57 cents on $9.23 billion. GAAP income was up 17% to $2.2 billion or 43 cents a share. Unfortunately Oracle had guided to revenue of $8.99 billion-$9.34 billion. It said new licenses were up 2% to $2 billion when it had guided to an increase of 6%-16% and updates and product support was up 9% to $4 billion. It’s supposedly not seeing a slowdown in Europe. It even said the US public sector was pretty good. CRM is supposed to be up close to 20%. Most of everything else, however, looks off. Hardware was down 14% to $953 million – when it was supposed to be flat to down 5% – and that’s despite what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said was accelerated sales of engineered systems. According to him “Exadata growth was well over 100% compared to last year, and Exalogic grew more than 100% on a sequential basis. We shipped our first SPARC SuperCluster in Q2 and expect to begin deliveries of our Exalytics system and the Oracle Big Data Appliance in Q3.” Evidently the product transition from the T3 to T4 Sparc chip was a hold-up since it requires a brand new system and people aren’t going to buy outdated equipment so late in the cycle. In addition, Oracle could only deliver a few SuperClusters since they only became available at the end of the quarter. But Hurd maintains that Oracle pipeline is as full as it’s ever been, with Exalogic ramping faster than the Exadata machine, something he’s said before. Larry said 200 Exadata/logic machines were sold in Q2 and prophesized that 300 would be sold this quarter and 400 in Q4. By then they’ll be a billion-dollar business that he said will double next fiscal year. Bernstein ace analyst Toni Sacconaghi noticed that wasn’t quite as many as previously forecast and Ellison had to admit he was right. Oracle might not triple its installed base, maybe it’ll only be up 2.5x, Ellison said, but “It’s still spectacular.” Oracle’s GAAP operating margin was 35%; its non-GAAP margin was 45%, which it’s pleased enough with, and it claims it should return to pre-Sun margins soon. Oracle’s workforce was up 1,700 salesmen in the first half. Co-president Mark Hurd said in a statement, “We believe that this increase in our field organization combined with innovative new products like Fusion Cloud ERP and Cloud CRM will enable solid organic growth in the second half of this year.” Oracle exceeded estimates in the four previous quarters and it’s going to have tough compare this quarter because last year was sensational. It’s forecasting total revenues will be up 3%-7% this quarter. That would work out to somewhere between $9 billion and $9.42 billion. It said new software licenses would be flat to up 10% and hardware down 5% to 15%. Adjusted earning should be 56 cents-59 cents. The Street had it down for 58 cents on $9.46 billion. To console investors Oracle said it could buy back another $5 billion worth of stock at some point. It’s got $31 billion in the bank.

Oracle Amends Itanium Countersuit

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:15:00 EST

Last Friday Oracle amended its countersuit against HP over their Itanium flap claiming it was tricked into settling the suit HP filed over ex-HP CEO Mark Hurd joining Oracle a month after he was ousted from HP. Oracle wants the agreement canceled. HP claims the agreement includes a contractual stipulation binding Oracle to support HP’s Itanium machines with its software, which is what the ruckus is all about. Oracle claims it would never have come to terms over Hurd – let alone sign a partnership agreement unrelated to Hurd – if it knew HP was going to hire Oracle antagonists Léo Apotheker as CEO and make Ray Lane its chairman.

NaviSite Offers Monthly Oracle Software Licenses to ISVs

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:30:00 EST

NaviSite on Monday announced it will offer monthly Oracle software licenses to its independent software vendor (ISV) customers through Oracle’s SaaS for ISVs model. NaviSite is a Platinum level member of Oracle Partner Network (OPN). With monthly Oracle software licensing, NaviSite ISV customers can take advantage of a flexible usage-based billing that accommodates changing business needs. The Oracle software licensing is seamlessly integrated into NaviSite’s hosting services, and complements traditional licensing.

Building Enterprise Class Oracle Databases on Amazon Web Services

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 05:30:00 EST

AWS is built on commodity hardware and it is software virtual machine based. AWS documentation states that: It's inevitable that EC2 instances will fail, and you need to plan for it. As a rule of thumb, you should be a pessimist when designing architecture for the cloud. That means that putting your Oracle databases on AWS cloud should be accompanied with carefully thought out fault tolerance and DR procedures. Usual practice of performing Oracle database backups should be carefully implemented and monitored. Databases can be backed up efficiently and conveniently to AWS S3 disk based storage using RMAN/S3 MML interface. This includes lower, non-production environments, to reduce rebuild time and preserve database side structures - tables and stored procedures.

cVidya Achieves Oracle Exadata Ready Status

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:37:00 EST

cVidya’s MoneyMap® Version 6.5 has achieved Oracle Exadata Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). This will significantly assist clients with the extreme performance available only with Oracle Exadata Database Machine. This announcement demonstrates that cVidya has fully tested and supports MoneyMap Version 6.5 on Oracle Exadata Database Machine, including Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Linux. This milestone follows cVidya's recent participation in the OPN Forum opening keynote session at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 where cVidya's executives highlighted the benefits of the Oracle Exastack Program and cVidya's achievement of Oracle Exadata Ready status. cVidya is also on track to achieve Oracle Exastack Optimized status as part of the Oracle Exastack Program. Third party applications that are Oracle Exastack Optimized signal to customers that they have been tested and tuned to achieve optimal performance, scalability and reliability.

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Gain Total Cloud Control

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is the only complete cloud management solution built and engineered to help you reduce IT complexity and improve your agility to changing business needs. In his session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Director, Oracle, Enterprise Manager Product Marketing, will provide an in-depth look at the new and unique benefits of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c for enterprise cloud. Learn how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c brings together three essential capabilities we call Total Cloud Control.

Overcoming Large Oracle Database Performance Problems

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:09:00 EDT

Database sharding provides a method for scalability across independent servers, each with their own CPU, memory and disk. A database shard is a horizontal partition in a database. AWS quick instance creation/decommissioning capabilities make it quite easy to implement database sharding in very flexible fashion. Typical Oracle VLDB is multi terabyte megalith running on big, expensive hardware. It is hard or impossible to back up, adding or modifying columns can take days and query optimization is very difficult. Database sharding is a well known method of breaking up a large database into smaller, manageable pieces ( database shards ). It is data warehouses i.e. VLDBs that can best take advantage of AWS database sharding capabilities. Basic premise is: manage huge volume of data by splitting it into multiple databases instead of creating table partitions. Database sharding provides a method for scalability across independent servers, each with their own CPU, memory and disk. A database shard is a horizontal partition in a database. AWS quick instance creation/decommissioning capabilities make it quite easy to implement database sharding in very flexible fashion.

Oracle-Google Trial Slips into Next Year

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 07:49:00 EDT

Judge William Alsup has now definitely said that there ain’t gonna be an Oracle-Google trial this year. In place of that disappointment he has proposed that there be a three-phase trial before the same jury: the first on copyright infringement, the second on patent infringement, and the third on willfulness/damages. Oracle and Google have until November 18 to complain. FOSS Patents says the plan favors Google but that may just be because the judge believes “that Google is on the losing track, so he may just want to reduce the degree of certainty on Oracle’s part in order to increase the likelihood of a settlement.”

Oracle Buys RightNow for $1.5 Billion

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Oracle says it’s buying RightNow Technologies, the cloud-based customer service shop, for $43 a share or approximately $1.5 billion net of RightNow’s cash and debt. RightNow closed Friday at around $36. Its Customer Service Cloud works across call centers, the web and social networks. Oracle figures to add the widgetry to its newfangled Public Cloud as a SaaS and PaaS offering for marketing and selling as well as service and support. Oracle says it is “moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of cloud solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Oracle Exadata, NoSQL, Big Data, Hadoop, Cloud

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:07:33 EDT

We are looking at problems these technologies attempt to solve and their inherent limitations, in relations to their usefulness in enterprise computing. Oracle database is a relational database management system that mostly complies with ACID transaction requirements (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability). It means that each database transaction will be executed in a reliable, safe and integral manner. In order to comply with ACID Oracle database software implements fairly complex and expensive (in terms of computing resources, i.e., CPU, disk, memory) set of processes like redo and undo logging, memory latching, meta data maintenance etc. that make concurrent work possible, while maintaining data integrity. Any database transaction or even SELECT statement makes relational database systems perform tremendous amounts of work behind the scene, thus making it inherently slow and resource intensive.

Oracle to Buy Endeca

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EDT

HP bought Autonomy so Oracle Tuesday said it’s buying privately held Endeca Technologies for some undisclosed amount of money that you can bet your bippy is no where near the billions HP paid for Autonomy to help it analyze unstructured data like Autonomy. Endeca, which started in 1999, has raised a reported $69.1 million in venture capital and Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund figures Oracle is paying $750 million-$900 million for Endeca’s revenues of about $150 million a year. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who claimed he was offered Autonomy, ridiculed HP for spending the money it did on the 10 times bigger British company. The deal is supposed to close by the end of the year.

AWS Announced New Scaling and Availability Features for Oracle Databases

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:57:17 EDT

Amazon RDS is already offering Multi-AZ deployments and Read Replicas for MySQL databases. We are looking at what feature will look like when released for Oracle databases, how it will be implemented and what best possible uses are. Oracle database is offering a rich set of HA options in a non-Amazon world - active/passive clusters based on operating system failover capabilities (for example, IBM HACMP), active/active instances - Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters), Oracle Data Guard (physical and logical standby databases located in remote data center). Amazon Web Services RDS (Relational Database Service) is already offering multi-AZ deployments for MySQL, soon to be released for Oracle databases too.

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Many Clouds, Many Choices

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:00:00 EDT

As enterprise adoption of cloud computing accelerates, organizations must have a strategy and plan for moving to the cloud. What should you put into public clouds? Should you create a private cloud? Should you use cloud applications, platform or infrastructure? How should organizations get started on the road to cloud computing? In his general ession at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Rex Wang, Vice President of Product Marketing at Oracle, will explore best practices for how organizations can move to cloud computing.

The Great Oracle v Google Android Trial Postponed Indefinitely

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EDT

District Court Judge William Alsup Wednesday postponed Google’s billion-dollar-plus trial for allegedly infringing Oracle’s Java patents and copyrights in Android that was tentatively set to start October 31. No new date has been scheduled. Judge Alsup previously warned that he might have to vacate the date reportedly to hear a murder trial that starts October 24 and could run until January or February but now he’s told Oracle and Google’s lawyers that he might shift their case to another judge. Complaining that he’s never been so overworked in the 37 years of his professional life, he told them, “Your case is huge and needs the attention of somebody who can give it more time than I can.”

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Building Agility into the Cloud Infrastructure

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EDT

Learn how Oracle enables the rapid deployment and efficient management of public and private cloud infrastructure with application aware virtualization and advanced cloud management capabilities that are integrated with best-of breed-compute, storage, and network technologies. In their session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Kris Bakke, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure Solution Manager, Oracle Optimized Solution at Oracle, and Ferhat Hatay, Director of Product Marketing, Systems & Cloud Computing at Oracle, will not only cover the quantifiable benefits of using Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, and Sun Blades as an integrated, shared service foundation, but will also cover documented best practices designed to minimize deployment risks and accelerate ROI. Gain additional insights for deploying cost-effective IaaS solutions that provide resource pooling, elastic scalability, and rapid application deployments to support the most demanding business needs.

Cloud Reference Architecture at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:15:00 EDT

Public, private, hybrid software, platform, infrastructure as a service? Once you've decided you need a cloud, you're going to need an architecture. This presentation gives an overview of Oracle's Cloud Reference Architecture, which is part of the Oracle Cloud Enterprise Technology Strategy (ETS). In his session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, James Baty, Vice President of Global Architecture at Oracle, will cover key concepts such as common management layer capabilities, service models, resource pools, and deployment abstraction, and look at some key design and operational use cases.

Which Cloud Service Provider Should Host Your Oracle Databases?

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 05:00:00 EDT

We are looking at what makes Amazon Web Services the likely choice of IaaS Cloud Service Providers for your enterprise data center needs. Big shift towards Cloud environment has started. It is now clear that this change is similar in magnitude to the shift from mainframe to client-server computing two decades ago. Amazon Web Services is the pioneer and market leader in Cloud computing space. Other vendors are playing catch up and do not come close to the breadth and scale of AWS offerings. Services and features Amazon provides are quite extensive and cover many of the enterprise-class computing needs. APIs and command line interfaces are available for each service, which makes scripting and automation achievable. Documentation is publicly available and there is large ecosystem of organizations and individuals proficient in use of AWS.

Enterprise Class Oracle Databases in the Public Cloud?

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:36:00 EDT

Most of enterprise class shops today run their Oracle databases on either HP-UX, AIX or Sun OS operating systems. Is it possible to move these databases to the public cloud, and, if so, who are providers who can help with such a move? Public cloud services are closely related to virtualization i.e. usage of various flavors of popular Virtual Machines (VMware, XEN). VMs are one of major ingredients giving cloud services such great characteristics as scalability, on-demand instant provisioning and deprovisioning of resources. Virtual Machines are able to run many guest operating systems - mostly flavors of Linux, Windows and Open Solaris. Most public cloud providers are not using or supporting proprietary HP, IBM and Sun Virtual Machines that host HP-UX, IBM AIX and Sun OS operating systems. Majority of public cloud providers use either VMware or XEN Virtual Machines i.e. they only support Linux/Windows/Open Solaris operating systems. That leaves you with two options if you are considering moving your HP-UX, AIX or Sun OS based Oracle databases to the public cloud.

Oracle RMAN, BMC Patrol Catalogs Hosted in Amazon Cloud

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:15:00 EDT

Oracle RMAN catalog database is a central repository for all backup and restore metadata for Oracle databases. RMAN catalog database should not grow too big in order to deliver good performance. BMC Patrol and other monitoring tools require database, often Oracle, to store monitoring results. We will describe why and how to move or create your RMAN catalog and monitoring repositories in Amazon Web Services Cloud. Amazon Web Services gives us the possibility to quickly and easily create either brand new RMAN catalog database or move an existing catalog to it. If purging fails to remove sufficient number of rows and current catalog becomes too big and then we can create another RMAN catalog and direct backups for newly created Oracle databases to it. RMAN catalog is ideally positioned to take advantage of Amazon Web Services EC2 Cloud since RMAN application perfectly scales horizontally. All you need to do is to add new repository database once catalog reaches certain size. The only change on source database servers ( ones being backed up ) is that they will have to point to new RMAN catalog database. You can start using new catalog simply by adding a new entry to TNSNAMES.ORA configuration file on database server that is backed up. This is same as pointing to any other on-premise RMAN catalog, the only difference being target host name.

Move Your Oracle Databases to Amazon EC2 Cloud

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:00:00 EDT

Amazon Web Services EC2 Cloud is full scale public data center offering services that are in many aspects far ahead of ancient practices present in regular IT environments. Fast provisioning and virtually unlimited scale make old fashioned server procurement and installations look like what they are - past century's practices. This article will not deal with usual objections to cloud computing revolving around change management difficulties ( how to incorporate new environment into the existing IT infrastructure ), security, reliability, performance etc. since we think that all those issues exist in internal, in-house IT departments, perhaps at even larger degree compared to what Amazon EC2 can provide. Cloud will not solve all IT problems but will at least dramatically increase IT productivity while reducing capex and opex. We are going to briefly describe how to migrate your existing Oracle databases and related applications to Amazon EC2 cloud.

Oracle to Present Opening Keynote at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EDT

For enterprise class cloud services, companies need a broad, comprehensive and flexible platform for their applications. Oracle recently announced the Oracle Public Cloud, which offers a broad set of best-in-class, integrated services that are elastic, secure and manageable, offering organizations choice in development and deployment of business critical applications. In his opening keynote at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Tyler Jewell, VP, Product Management & Strategy, Oracle Public Cloud, will discuss how the new services can speed your application development and deployment time, while maintaining a low cost infrastructure and the ease with which you can access, use and manage them.

Oracle Goes Cloud

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 08:30:00 EDT

Larry Ellison, who once famously called cloud computing “water vapor” and “complete gibberish,” capitulated this week and announced the coming of an Oracle Public Cloud at Oracle OpenWorld. Untroubled by any inconsistency, Ellison basically shrugged and said, “Everyone’s got a cloud. We need a cloud.” Users are meant to run Oracle’s cloud-ified Java-based Fusion Applications and BPEL-based Fusion Middleware, as-is Oracle databases and existing custom-built Java EE apps on a resource-intensive subscription-based Oracle-managed, -hosted and -supported single-tenant infrastructure that Oracle is building out of its own (Xen?) virtualized Sun hardware that will give them instant provisioning and elasticity on-demand.

Oracle OpenWorld 2011: The Video Outtakes

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:33:00 EDT

My guests and I (mostly me) share the collection of flubs, scrubs and otherwise unusable material from the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 videos. What better way to spend a few minutes on a Friday than watching someone else screw up.

The Oracle Database Cloud Service vs Oracle on Amazon RDS, EC2

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:17:24 EDT

The Oracle Database Cloud is Platform as a Service ( PaaS ) so it only makes sense to compare it to Oracle on Amazon RDS. Oracle on Amazon EC2, on the other hand, is an IaaS ( Infrastructure as a Service ) offering, which gives you full control over the installation, features and actions around your database. Oracle Public Cloud will consist of a number of major services, the Oracle Database Cloud being one of them. One of the most interesting characteristics of the Oracle Database Cloud is that there is no need to purchase database license. In that respect service is similar to Amazon RDS. The Oracle Database Cloud is based on monthly subscription -"per user-per month or per environment-per month basis." Access to the database is likely to be at the level of an application database administrator i.e. you will only have access to "database schemas, application development tools, data loading services, Web Services APIs". Interestingly enough, it looks like you will actually get access to a single schema only ("Each Oracle Database Cloud Service uses a single Oracle database schema. The Oracle schema provides full isolation for each individual Database Cloud Service," which is identical to Salesforce.com multi-tenant model. This is the same model that Larry Ellison mocked during The Oracle Cloud Service announcement at Oracle Open World 2011. In other words, you are not going to get the whole database for yourself, you will be sharing it with other users.

Oracle v Google Trial Date May Slip

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EDT

Seems we will probably be deprived of the spectacle of Oracle going after Google and Google doing a lot of whimpering because it looks like the Oracle v Google trial over Google’s use of Java, which is set to start on Halloween, will probably be postponed to give precedence to a big unrelated criminal trial. The FOSS Patents blog says that the trial judge, William Alsup, is making postponement noises. It says he “just put in a new ‘notice re pretrial conference,’ which says that the Oracle-Google trial ‘will likely be postponed’ and that the Halloween trial date ‘will not yet be vacated’ though it ‘now seems unlikely’ to work out.”