Blog

Once again,  I’m honored and excited to have an article in IOUG SELECT Journal’s 3rd Quarter 2016 edition. This time, I’m delving deeply into the latest features of Oracle 12cR1 Real Application Testing in the first part of a two-part series entitled Regression Analyzed, Tout de Suite: Leveraging Oracle 12c Database Real Application Testing (RAT) Suite. I’ve recently leveraged that tool to experiment with multiple scenarios for evaluating Oracle Database 12.1.0.2’s Database In-Memory Features … which I’ll explain in the second part of the series, of course! If you don’t have an IOUG membership, you can still browse a copy of my article in PDF format … but seriously, shouldn’t you have membership in one of the best Oracle User Groups in North America?

I also enjoyed interviewing my able colleague Der’ly Guiterrez from OnX Enterprise Solutions for his article entitled The Wolf Is Always at the (Hospital) Door: Reducing Information Security Risks for Health Care Organizations.  Der’ly’s role as OnX’s Security Practice lead gave us a chance to explore some of the typical challenges that security breaches of IT organizations can cause, especially when that organization is responsible for sensitive PHI or PCI data.

IT Central Station recently interviewed me at COLLABORATE16 in Las Vegas and asked me for my professional opinion of Oracle Database 12cR1’s feature sets, especially Database In-Memory and Multitenancy. I also provided a glimpse of coming attractions – some (already public) information on how DBIM and Multitenant is going to work in 12cR2 – and how I believe those features will make short work of transitioning to a Hybrid Cloud environment in the coming months after 12cR2 finally moves out of beta testing mode and into general availability.

If you have a few spare minutes, please take a look and let me know what you think!

In my latest IOUG SELECT Journal article – DBA, Heal Thyself: 5 Diseases of IT Organizations
and How Oracle DBAs Can Cure Them – I mentioned a specific ailment that I call Idiomyopia. (It’s my term for IT organizations that tolerate incompetent Oracle DBAs.)

It’s not unusual for an Oracle DBA’s incompetence to be identified well after they’ve been hired because of inadequate HR screening policies, or because of inadequate technical interviews. Sometimes, however, a candidate has simply pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes because their CV, resume, and educational background seems to be a virtually perfect fit for the job. It only becomes painfully obvious after the DBA has been asked to do something relatively simple – say, set up a database backup, or perform complete recovery, or even tune a troublesome SQL statement for better performance – that we discover we’ve been the victim of our own Idiomyopia.

And what happens to the newly-discovered incompetent DBA? Usually … nothing. They simply become relegated to simpler, less-demanding tasks, even though they’ve essentially perpetrated fraud against their employer. No legal action is taken;  perhaps they even saunter off to another job where the masquerade continues.

So I have a modest proposal for my brethren competent Oracle DBAs. Whenever we discover this type of fraud, let’s try a novel approach: shaming. My inspiration for this idea is an ongoing anti-corruption campaign being waged in India by those appalled by the audacity with which they are regularly approached for bribes on a daily basis. The idea is simple: Instead of offering money when asked for a bribe, a zero-rupee note emblazoned with the image of  Mahatma Gandhi is tendered instead.

In that same spirit, I’ve produced a facsimile of a zero-dollar bill. It carries my disapproving visage and is suitably emblazoned in Latin phrases, so feel free to print some off and have them ready for your next round of technical interviews with a suspected “exaggerator.” (Oh, and just in case your Latin is rusty … Mendax Mendax Braccae Igni roughly translates to Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.)

At long last, I’m honored to announce that my second book has been published!

I labored intensely alongside my co-authors – Mike Ault, Tariq Farooq, Guy Harrison, Mohammed Houri, Syed Jaffar Hussain, and Paulo Portugal – to bring our years of experience to bear on some of the more common (and not-so-common!) problems that an Oracle DBA is likely to encounter during her career and provide common-sense, practical solutions to solving those problems in short order.

So feel free to take a look inside at our new book. It’s available in soft-cover as well as Kindle format. And please let us know what you think – don’t be afraid to write a quick review if you’ve found the common-sense strategies and techniques have been helpful to your career or just in your day-to-day Oracle DBA activities.

I recently had the honor of participating in an intensive week of Oracle 12c Release 2 (12cR2) beta testing during the week of April 25-29 at Oracle HQ in Belmont, CA. I joined an elite team of ten Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors to explore the latest features of Oracle 12cR2. It was a most intense experience, as we tested 12cR2 (quite literally!) from sun-up to sun-down for four straight days. We focused our combined attention on installation and upgrade tasks that any Oracle DBA would normally conduct as they’d transition from earlier releases to 12cR2; we also experimented with many of the latest features of 12cR2, including Database Sharding, Multitenancy, and Database In Memory.

What amazed me personally was the responsiveness of the Oracle development team, who were on hand to help us document and research any unexpected behavior, blips, and documentation consistency. Punctuating our testing efforts were several in-depth briefings on the various new features of Oracle 12cR2 from key Oracle senior product managers including Penny Avril, Maria Colgan, Andy Rivenes, Patrick Wheeler, and Markus Michalewicz.

Our beta testing team presented our findings on the final day. Most of the 12cR2 development team and many of the corresponding senior product managers attended. It was also humbling to see Andy Mendelsohn stopping by briefly to hear our reports. With over 200 years of Oracle database experience between us, our beta testing group was quite pleased with what we discovered about 12cR2 in terms of its numerous new features, its stability, and its ease of use. I’d love to tell you more … but if you’re not in the beta testing program, you’ll have to wait just a little bit longer to experience 12cR2 for yourself.

Along with four other Oracle ACEs, I was recently honored to have a chance to express my opinions on Oracle’s Public Cloud offerings during a series of interviews with PROFIT magazine. It was a fantastic (and humbling!) opportunity to speak my mind on how IT organizations in general – and Oracle DBAs in particular – can take advantage of Oracle Public Cloud’s unique solutions to application scalability, security, and capacity enhancement.

I’m excited that PROFIT quoted me on the future state of Oracle database administration: “DBAs aren’t going away. We’re going to finally do what we should be focused on.” Give it a read, and let me know what you think!

I’m excited to announce that the renowned publication Database Trends and Analysis (DBTA) has chosen to print my latest article on Oracle Database 12c In-Memory features entitled Tips for Accelerating Analytics with Oracle Database In-Memory. It was quite humbling to have my colleagues at Oracle, especially Maria Colgan (whom I think of as the Goddess of All Things DBIM) thoroughly vet my understanding of IMCS. I hope you find it an interesting read that drives you to consider leveraging the unique advantages of In-Memory Column Store for speeding up your analytic queries and decision support workloads. There’s more in-memory magic coming in the next few months when Oracle 12c Release 2 finally arrives, but this is a great time to start familiarizing yourself with IMCS features and benefits.

Of course, I’m also excited about my most recent article in IOUG SELECT Journal’s 2nd Quarter 2016 edition entitled DBA, Heal Thyself: Five Diseases of IT Organizations and How Oracle DBAs Can Cure Them. As its title suggests, I’ve summarized five typical maladies of IT organizations today that I’ve seen in the past 15 years as an Oracle DBA, Oracle University instructor, consultant, and pre-sales associate. For the first time ever, a publisher has seen fit to print something from me without [… drum roll …] a single line of code in it.  I’m sure it will cause some raised eyebrows, some heads nodding in agreement, and perhaps even a flash of anger and frustration, but that’s what I intended because if you’re an Oracle DBA today, I share your pain (and your organization’s as well). If you don’t have an IOUG membership, you can still browse a copy of my article in PDF format … but seriously, shouldn’t you have membership in one of the best Oracle User Groups in North America? I look forward hopefully to your amusement, await your comments, and apologize in advance if I’ve stirred your passion. Please enjoy!

In my last three decades in Information Technology, I’ve often been asked to perform deep technical interviews with candidates for open positions. I’ve discovered a rather unnerving trend that’s begun to accelerate over the last five years: a significant uptick in the number of candidate Oracle DBAs who apparently see nothing wrong with exaggerating their experience in a particular technology. Some recent and particularly disturbing examples:

• An interviewee whose CV claimed she had significant experience with Oracle Database Real Application Clusters couldn’t explain to me what would happen to the database instance on a node if I accidentally terminated a crucial background process. (She insisted that I’d have to restart the instance manually.)
• Another interviewee was unable to explain why ASM was elemental to the efficient operation of storage cells on an Exadata Database Machine … even though his resume claimed he had almost seven years of deep Exadata experience.
• A third interviewee’s CV claimed deep understanding of Oracle Data Guard technology … but he couldn’t explain why Data Guard Broker would be of particular value, especially when managing a switchover operation.

Based on informal discussions with my students when I taught classes for Oracle University, these were actually rather tame experiences, as these candidates had merely exaggerated their skills. I’ve heard numerous anecdotes about Oracle DBA candidates with excellent resumes and stellar technical interview results that were hired as full-time employees. By then it was too late to discover that they didn’t know how to diagnose simple application performance issues, perform basic database backup and recovery tasks, or even explain the simplest concepts of how an Oracle database actually works.

I’ve often said that the profession of Oracle DBA is much like that of a surgeon or airline pilot because if we make a serious mistake, production data could be lost or corrupted, and that could mean that someone’s health – or even someone’s life – could be at stake. But that’s where the comparison also ends: A phony or incompetent airline pilot is usually detected fairly quickly and fired, and incompetent surgeons lose their status with their state board of review, and are prohibited from practicing medicine, but an incompetent DBA is often simply demoted to lesser duties, or in rare cases terminated … and usually continues to work somewhere else without any disciplinary action being taken.

If you’ve recently encountered similar experiences, please send them to me using the form below with as much detail as possible. I’d like to know if I’m alone in these observations, or if other Oracle DBA professionals have seen a similar uptick. If it turns out that this is a real epidemic, I have some ideas on how to stem its tide as well.

If you’ve heard about Attribute Clustering and Zone Mapping – two brand-new features in Oracle Database Release 12.1.0.2 – then be sure to check out my latest IOUG SELECT Journal Q4 2015 Article, which does a deep dive on these features. And if you aren’t a member of IOUG, feel free to check out a complimentary PDF version of this article. I’m looking forward to your interested feedback!

Have a happy holiday season, and here’s to an exhilarating 2016.