This is why to test your backups!

Attention DBAs: listen carefully to this tale of woe…

At the Alaska Dept. of Revenue recently, a “technician” committed not one, but two, serious errors: first, he mistakenly deleted over 600,000 customer records (which were scanned paper applications from state residents); second, he reformatted the backup drive!

 I’ll wait for the gasps and nausea to subside among you DBAs reading this.

But wait, it gets better. The department had a third line of defense: the data was also on tape. Lo and behold — you guessed it — the backup tapes were unreadable. Did I mention that the data was worth $38 billion (not million, billion)? The phrase “criminally incompetent” comes to mind. 

Believe it or not, there was a happy ending to this sad story. The “old school” backup was still available — 300 boxes containing the original paper applications. These were re-scanned and the database was reconstructed. It took 70 people six weeks to do this, to the tune of $200,000 in overtime.

The morals of the story are obvious:  1) have a backup and recovery plan that includes worst-case scenarios, 2) test your backups regularly and 3) check the references of “technicians” that you hire!

Cheers, Tim

What do you know from storage management?

Getting the most out of database storage management means keeping up with the myriad data storage tools, techniques and concepts that continually pop up in the IT marketplace.
 
It’s especially important for DBAs to keep up with best storage management practices because, according to the Independent Oracle Users Group, they’re the ones handling much of that workload these days. More and more, says IOUG president Ari Kaplan, the roles of storage manager and DBA are converging and this trend will have a significant impact on the future or both careers.
 
In this new SearchOracle.com podcast interview, I talked to Kaplan to find out about the forces at play which are driving a huge increase in database storage requirements, the converging roles of DBA and storage manager, and about the Oracle and non-Oracle tools that are available to help DBAs manage storage more efficiently. Kaplan also previews next month’s Collaborate ’07 conference — one of the biggest Oracle user conferences of the year — where you can bet that database storage management will be a hot topic.
 
If you’re interested in learning more about database storage management, then this is the podcast for you. Download it today then let us know what you thought about it.

 – Mark Brunelli, News Editor

Oracle experts to the rescue, or how to ask for help and get it

Shay Shmeltzer, who works with JDeveloper, devotes significant time every day to answering questions on the OTN discussion forums. He recently wrote a blog post called “10 Commandments for the OTN Forum Member” which lists ways to improve your chances of getting a solid answer to your question, as well as ways to become a positive member of an Oracle community.

Our Ask the Experts section on SearchOracle.com isn’t exactly a forum, but many of these rules still apply. You’re more likely to receive a response to your question, and a detailed one that will solve your specific problem, if you follow these guidelines of Shay’s:

• Give details about versions and technologies. What version of Oracle are you using? What’s your operating system?
• Give detailed error messages. It’s especially helpful if you copy the stack trace into your email.
• Search before you post. More often than not, the problem you’re having has already been addressed somewhere on the Web — on our site or one of the many Oracle forums out there. You’ll save yourself and our experts a lot of time if you try Google first.

Here are a few more tips to remember when posing a question to our of our experts:

• Post in the correct category. If you ask a migration question in the SQL category, it might never be addressed.
• Don’t post a question to an archived category. The experts for our “archived” categories are no longer taking questions, but you can still search their content.
• Try our learning guides too. You’ll find hundreds of expert responses organized by category in our learning guides, so try those to get instant answers to your questions. Our “Fast guide to solving common Oracle errors” is especially popular.

Thanks,
Elisa

Database administration one of the fastest-growing jobs

Forbes reported a few days ago that database administration is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the United States. DBAs came in at #12, and are projected to go from 104,000 in 2004 to 144,000 in 2014, an increase of 38.20%.  

It should come as no shock that of the top 30 fastest-growing jobs, 17 are health care-related. (Number one is home health aides.) However, it was somewhat surprising that “network systems and data communications analysts” came in at #2, given automation and outsourcing. The latter reason likely accounts for the conspicuous absence of developers on the list. (Although they probably appear on India’s list!)

Forbes lists the current starting pay for DBAs as $43,605, which seems low. One hopes that as demand increases, salaries will follow. Still, DBAs have a long way to go to get to the best-paying tech job: SAP functional consultants (boo! hiss!), who earn an average of $163,000.

Database administration as a career has been on various “hot lists” for some time now, but blogger Venkat Devraj says that the real problem is the lack of quality DBAs:

“Sure there are lots of bodies around the planet, but there just aren’t enough qualified professionals to meet the growing requirements. People that not only can handle part of the job load, but those that can also communicate well with their users and peers. People that not only know the mechanics behind a task, but also what needs to be done and when to a database to meet user requirements and business growth. If these job growth statistics aren’t a clarion call for leveraging automation, I don’t know what is!”

This reminds me of the heated debate at an IOUG show a few years ago (Are DBAs really needed anymore?), in which automation was alternately seen as inevitable and irrelevant, or the cause of the demise of the DBA. Venkat clearly comes down on the former side:

News flash: database administration isn’t rocket science… and btw, even rocket science leverages automation in more ways than one can imagine… Wake up guys and smell the coffee. IT automation is happening in a big way. The companies that don’t embrace it will be relegated to the dark ages.

One thing is clear: if demand for DBAs continues to increase and supply can’t keep up, automation will play a larger and larger role in database and system administration.

Cheers, Tim

Your Oracle wish list

At one time or another, most of you have probably checked out the Ask Tom Web site. Like our own Ask the Expert feature, Tom Kyte’s Ask Tom site is a go-to when you’re stumped by an Oracle problem, like resolving an error or writing a complex SQL query. All the old questions are archived, and frequently, answers continue to be updated years after the questions were originally asked.

For example, in September 2005, an Ask Tom user, Alex, asked Tom the following:

I was wondering if there are some things you don’t like about Oracle? I personally wish more things came set up out of the box such as autotrace, intermedia text, scott schema etc. Any thoughts on this?

Tom named some gripes (he called for better error messages, for instance) and then wrote, “I’ll publish this to see what others add.”

Many, many Oracle users have added to the list since then. Some of the problems have already been resolved — one of the first to comment requested better cross-platform data file compatibility. 10gR2 now allows cross-platform full database transports with the same endianness.

The most recent complaint was added just a few days ago. Tim Kessler requested a polling option in SQL*Plus to continually execute a SQL statement for a given interval for monitoring functions.

What about you? What’s on your Oracle wish list? What bug slows you down? What one feature would make your life as an Oracle DBA easier?

-Elisa, Assistant Editor

Oracle’s open source aspirations

Oracle made some open source headlines this week at the EclipseCon Eclipse Foundation conference, announcing that it had open sourced Oracle TopLink, the database giant’s Java persistence framework. Oracle also announced that it had risen to the level of board member of Eclipse – an open source community formed to create and innovate an open source development platform – and said they’re also proposing that TopLink make up the foundation of a new project aimed at providing a comprehensive, open source persistence platform.  

Now I’m no expert on open source projects. In fact, I’m not much of an expert on anything, save for Star Trek and Ring Dings. But I think it’s clear that there is some significance here — especially if you think about what Oracle’s ongoing support for an open source development framework could one day mean for Microsoft’s .Net platform.  

Oracle seems to have endless resources at its fingertips.  If the company continues to support Eclipse, and if open source in general continues to grow its appeal to enterprises, it’s not hard to imagine Eclipse one day coming up with a viable alternative to .Net. At the very least they should at least be able to come up with something that’s steals at least some of that market share from Redmond.

Could an open source development project steal customers from Microsoft? Is Oracle’s growing support of open source going to make a difference in the long run? Let’s hear what you think.

 – Mark Brunelli, News Editor

Who’s next?

If you’re keeping track, the purchase of Hyperion is the 24th acquisition by Oracle in the company’s three-year buying binge.

Rumors and predictions of a BI-related acquisition by Oracle have been rampant for months but the name most often mentioned was Cognos. The popular Oracle BI blogger Mark Rittman agreed that the Hyperion deal was unexpected:

Whilst many of us were caught by surprise by the move (including most people within Oracle, I suspect) the business logic does in fact look pretty compelling, and I think this is a hugely positive move by Oracle.

The acquisition is also likely to put other BI vendors at risk and may set off a domino effect on the market as other large vendors seek to compete, according to Ray Wang at Forrester Research:

IBM may buy Cognos, HP might end up buying Business Objects or Business Objects may buy another competitor. There will be a lot of pressure on these vendors to react to this acquisition.

What will Oracle’s arch-rival SAP do? Many observers think that the Hyperion purchase is a way for Oracle to get access to CFOs, many of which use SAP BI software. With the addition of Hyperion’s 1,900-person sales force — not to mention its 12,000 customers worldwide — you would think that SAP might be a little worried. However, if you believe comments from spokesperson Matt Carrington, SAP doesn’t have a care in the world:

Oracle’s strategy, limited by its inability to grow on its own, has resorted to attempting to acquire customers. This latest acquisition only further muddies Oracle’s already cluttered application landscape.

SAP has made the “Project Confusion” argument before, which certainly has it merits, but Oracle has seemingly no problem pressing forward with its strategy. Rittman notes:

What this is really about is Oracle vs. SAP — all Oracle does now, strategically, is framed in it’s desire to be the number one enterprise software vendor, which means being the number one ERP vendor, as all else flows from that. Oracle now is an ERP vendor with a nice sideline in databases and development tools, not the other way around, and they’ll happily live with a more heterogeneous tools and technology environment if it means they can get closer to that goal.

A SearchOracle.com member who wrote me yesterday insinuates that it’s all just an ego trip for Larry Ellison: “build me an empire seems to be the present game.”

Will the Oracle-Hyperion deal hurt SAP?

The Web is abuzz with different takes on Oracle’s plan to acquire Santa Clara, Calif.-based business intelligence (BI) software provider Hyperion Solutions Corp. for $3.3 billion. But the two lines of thought on the topic that intrigue me the most have to do with (1) Oracle’s desire to get closer to the chief financial officers (CFOs) of some very large firms and (2) Oracle’s desire to steal customers away from its chief rival, enterprise resource planning (ERP) giant SAP AG.
 
In a conference call this morning, Oracle president Charles Phillips said the deal for Hyperion, which among other things makes BI software that aggregates financial data into handy dashboards, will make Oracle the leader in the corporate performance management (CPM) market and prop up its growing BI business. He also said the Hyperion deal will give Oracle critical analytical applications including a new enterprise planning system, a powerful financial consolidation product, a strong OLAP engine and a large field sales organization.
 
According to blogger Larry Dignan, the biggest takeaway from today’s Oracle-Hyperion conference call relates to Hyperion’s 1,900 strong sales force. Hyperion serves the financial analytics space, therefore that sales organization has a lot of experience dealing directly with CFOs. And CFOs ultimately make the buying decisions for their companies. During the call, Phillips indicated that Oracle may be able to build on that relationship and upsell those CFOs on other Oracle applications.
 
What’s more, many of those CFOs work for companies that use SAP products. Building a good relationship with them — and then upselling them on Oracle’s SAP alternatives — could eventually Oracle chip away at SAP’s customer base. (Incidentally, shares of SAP fell considerably today on word of the  Oracle-Hyperion deal, according to published reports.)
 
Additionally, says Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang, the acquisiton could set off a string of acquisitions in the BI space as larger vendors like IBM, SAP and HP seek to compete with Oracle’s new BI prowess. That means specialty BI vendors like Cognos and Business Objects need to watch their backs.
 
It remains to be seen whether Oracle’s plan will be successful. Will they find that back door to SAP’s installed customer base? Will SAP react by acquiring a BI vendor of its own? How happy will these CFO’s be dealing with Oracle now instead of Hyperion. These are all things we at SearchOracle.com will be keeping an eye on — and things we want to hear your opinion about. So post your comments here. And stay tuned for a news analysis piece on what the Oracle-Hyperion deal means for Oracle’s Project Fusion initiative. Also, be sure to take our Oracle-Hyperion reader reaction survey. We’ll likely highlight the survey results in upcoming Oracle-Hyperion coverage.

– Mark Brunelli, News Editor

Does anybody really like SQL? Part 2

Following up on a post from last week, our resident SQL guru Rudy Limeback provides some more thoughts on the matter of what’s so bad (or so good) about SQL:

Yes, I ♥ SQL, primarily because knowledge of this ubiquitous language allows me to be immediately productive in working with so many different database systems.

Imagine if each time you wanted to obtain information from a different database system, you had to learn a completely different language.

Instead, all that is necessary is to learn the small, inconsequential differences between one database system’s implementation of SQL and the next.

MySQL  
T-SQL  
UDB SQL  
PostgreSQL  
PL/SQL

This is due in no small part to the effort of many people and vendors to define the SQL standard. That so few database systems faithfully support all aspects of the standard is no serious knock against the advantages of having a standard language.

Further, SQL is drop dead simple. There are only a few basic clauses:

SELECT

FROM

WHERE

GROUP BY

HAVING

ORDER BY

As well, you’ll need some simple concepts like INNER and OUTER JOINs, UNIONs, and subqueries. With these basic tools, you can solve even the most
complex data retrieval problems.

That said, it’s a lot like chess. You can learn the basic moves in half an hour, but you need to invest the necessary time to improve your skills. Practice, practice, practice.

It looks like we’re making some progress toward debunking the “SQL sucks” myth!

-Elisa Gabbert

Is DST the next Y2K? For Oracle shops, maybe it is…

If you read the mainstream media, the Daylight Savings Time bug will lead to the apocalypse that Y2K never was.

Hype, obviously, but nevertheless DST is a serious problem that all Oracle shops need to address. Besides the operating system problems, architect Chris Foote points out what the DST bug affects in Oracle:

•  JVM
• Time zone files
• Grid Control agents
• E-Business Suite
• Application Server

Unfortunately, the quantity of rants in the blogosphere indicates that Oracle’s response to the DST problem has been muddled at best. For example, over at the Yet Another Oracle DBA blog, Herod writes:

Is it just me, or is Oracle’s effort towards the DST seem to be a convoluted mess of notes, readme’s, more notes and superseding items. Download this, this, this, this, and this, and possibly this but only if you have this and this. 

Sounds like fun, especially if you have dozens or hundreds of systems to patch, like this blogger, who writes:

As someone who was forced to write DST checking scripts for an Enterprise of 1500+ Oracle databases, let me just say how utterly weak it is that Oracle has identified a DST 2007 issues with their database and provided barely any tools to help sniff around for it. What have they provided? A script to tell you if you have affected rows… A couple of other rag tag scripts here and there if you dig hard enough…. Pathetic.

If you’re just tackling the problem now, you’re up the proverbial creek (Mike R. has a good list of Metalink resources to get you started). But for those who have already completed the task, how did it go?  Is it a non-issue or an emergency? Any tips or tools that are essential?

Cheers, Tim