Oracle 19c, Oracle Cloud in numbers and pre-build environments on vagrant, docker and Oracle Linux Cloud Native environment, those were some of the topics at Open World Europe Conference in London. To see what’s behind with links to detailed sources, please read on.

The conference was organised by Oracle, most of the speakers were Oracle employees and introduced the audience at a high level into the Oracle ecosphere. To have an overview about what (huge portfolio) Oracle offers to the market and to get in touch with Oracle employees, open world conferences are the place to be. Many statements have already given at the bigger sister conference in San Francisco in October 2018, so European customers are the target audience for the conference in London. Most information on upcoming features given fall under save harbour statement, so one should be careful to take decisions based on these.

Oracle 19c

The main target in release 19 is stability, so fewer new features were added as in previous releases. Many new features are very well described on a post by our former dbi colleague Frank Pachot.

To get a deeper view into new features of every RDBMS release, a good source is to read the new features guides:

livesql.oracle.com is now running on Oracle 19, two demos on SQL functions introduced in 19c are available:

If you like to test Oracle 19c, you can participate in Oracle 19c beta program.

Oracle Cloud in numbers

  • 29’000’000+ active users
  • 25’000 customers
  • 1’075 PB storage
  • 83’000 VMs at 27 data centers
  • 1’600 operators

Reading these numbers, it’s obvious Oracle gains knowhow in Cloud environments and also understands better requirements building up private cloud environments at customers. It would be interesting to see what Oracle offers to small and medium sized companies.

Oracle Linux Cloud Native environment

Building up a stack with tools for DevOps teams can be very challenging for organizations:

  • huge effort
  • hard to find expert resources
  • no enterprise support
  • complex architectural bets

Thats why Oracle build up an stack on Oracle Linux that can be used both for dev, test and productive environments. Some features are:

The stack can be run in the cloud as well as on premises using Oracle Virtualbox. Since release 6, Virtualbox is able to move VMs to the Oracle Cloud.

Pre-build, ready-to-use environments on VirtualBox and Docker

It’s good practise to use Vagrant for fast Virtualbox provisioning. There are a couple of pre-build so called “Vagrant boxes” available by Oracle in their yum and githup repository.

If you want to test on pre-build oracle database environments (single instance, Real Application Cluster, Data Guard), Tim Hall provides Vagrant boxes for various releases.

If you are looking for pre-build docker containers, have a look at Oracle Container Registry.

Oracle strategy

To provide a pre-build stack follows a superior Oracle strategy: IT professionals should not deal with basic work (provisioning, patching, basic tuning), but concentrate on other, more important tasks. That why Oracle offers engineered systems and cloud services as a basis. What the more important subjects are was explained in a session about “the changing role of the DBA”.

Architecture

Security

  • No insecure passwords
  • Concept work: who should have access to what and in which context?
  • Analyse privileges with the help of DBMS_PRIVILEGE_CAPTURE package
  • Data masking/redaction in test and dev environment

Availability

Understand SQL

A personal highlight was the session from Chris R. Saxon which is as specialist for SQL. His presentation style is not only very entertaining, but also the content is interesting and helps you get the most out of Oracle Database engine. In Chris’ session, he explained why sql queries tend not to use indexes even there are present and do Full table scans instead. This is always bad and mainly based on clustering factor and data cardinality. You can follow his presentation on Youtube:

You can find more video content from Chris on his Youtube channel.

If you are interested to learn SQL, another great source is the Oracle SQL blog.

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