Managing an Oracle shop

Can Oracle be a contender in the virtualization wars?

Oracle has always been known as a fierce competitor, but when it comes to one area — virtualization — the software giant has stayed somewhat out of the limelight.

Is that about to change?

Oracle is reportedly in talks to acquire Virtual Iron, the fifth-largest server virtualization vendor,, and if they close the deal, the answer may very well be yes.

Still, even if the deal is made, Oracle may have a way to go before becoming a competitive force in the virtualization market. Currently, the software vendor lags other vendors in VM-friendly licensing and support policies, according to analysts. Experts also say the fact that Oracle software is only compatible on its own virtualization platform, Oracle VM, rather than the more widely supported VMware platform, puts it at a big disadvantage.

In the last round of “virtualization wars,” which took place this summer, Oracle wasn’t even considered a contender among Microsoft, VMware and Citrix. Now, Red Hat is in the mix, and analysts think that Oracle will be too with the purchase of Virtual Iron.

This isn’t Oracle’s only recent effort in the virtualization space. According to IT Business Edge blogger Arthur Cole, virtual management is becoming a problem as more and more shops become virtualized. A recent study from the IDC also found that as larger scale virtualization deployments become more common, there’s growing demand for sophisticated management software tools. And Oracle’s new Oracle VM Management Pack, released last week, provides Oracle VM users with new management capabilities, including automated deployment, built-in configuration management and policy based management.

Oracle also says that the Oracle VM Management Pack, which is part of the latest Oracle Enterprise Manager release, is affordable– “a major step forward in helping our customers drive down the cost of managing applications in virtual environments,” said Richard Sarwal, Oracle senior vice president Product Development.

But is Oracle doing enough to become a major virtualization player?

This is yet to be known, but it may be a challenge if Oracle continues to refuse supporting third-party virtualization software. According to the SearchServerVirtualization article, “Oracle would most likely buy Virtual Iron to beef up management tools for its virtualization technology, Oracle VM” — which, experts agree, “is not up to VMware standards.” And according to analyst Gordon Haff, [Virtual Iron] might be the fifth largest virtualization player, but that’s like being a fourth-string quarterback.”

What has your experience been with virtualization technology? What would you like to see Oracle do? Are you satisfied with Oracle VM, or would you like them to support VMware? What are the greatest obstacles you’ve had with using virtualization technology in your environment?

Many still holding off on Oracle database CPUs

Remember a month or so ago, when we asked whether Oracle’s critical patch updates (CPU) were all that critical?

The answer from many (outside of Oracle) was no. In fact, many DBAs considered it too much trouble. Responses ranged from “security ‘experts’ drumming up business through paranoia” to questions about when 11g will be hotpatchable as promised. Some even said, “we believe these patches ARE critical.”

Well, according to a release of the latest survey of the Independent Oracle Users Group (downloadable as a .pdf), many others are holding off on those patches. Now, the survey was co-sponsored by Oracle and we tend to take results from vendor-sponsored studies with a grain of salt, but it does offer some interesting insights. Of the 150 survey respondents, only 26% said CPUs were applied systematically across the entire environment when they’re released by Oracle. Another 19% reported that their organizations do not have any specific requirements for the application of vendor supplied security patches. In fact, 36% require some sort of justification for security patches and favor a risk analysis over a cost/benefit analysis.

The results came as little surprise to Pete Finnigan and he addressed them over on his Oracle security weblog.

He writes:

I always say two things. 1) CPU’s are only part of the problem of securing an Oracle database - that is to be secure you cannot just apply a CPU, you must do all of the other work to secure the database, configuration, privileges, access, audit…. much, much more and 2) at the end of the day; taking out all of the issues, you can either apply a CPU or not, its simple. Well its simple to say but in practice, psycologically, reallity[sic], its often hard to do for lots of reasons, mostly availability, performance, downtime, stability.

Certainly, database security remains a critical topic for organizations. According to a new database security report from Forrester Research (available free with registration), database attacks are at an all-time high. My colleague Shayna Garlick sat down for a podcast with Forrester’s Noel Yuhanna to discuss the results of his research. While Yuhanna asserts that Oracle has the most comprehensive database security, he also advises companies look to independent security providers. After all, most organizations are not Oracle only, they run heterogeneous shops.

So, while Oracle certainly seems to be paying attention to database security, it seems not everyone is listening. What does Oracle need to do to convince you to apply CPUs? Release them more often? Less often? Or are you content to parse through the relevant information to determine for yourself what’s “critical” and what can wait? Are your internal corporate processes adequate for the job?

Should Oracle negotiate its nonnegotiable maintenance fee?

Oracle software purchases carry with them a host of options and choices for buyers — cloud computing and SaaS, choosing between multiple applications that serve the same purpose, and a never-ending list of updates and upgrades. 

There is, however, one thing that never changes.

That is Oracle’s 22% annual maintenance fee, a nonnegotiable fee that Oracle president Charles Phillips describes the company as being “sticklers” on in this Information Week article.

But is it time for Oracle to rethink its policy?

That’s what some experts are thinking, especially as the economy continues to fall and more organizations are trying to save money and  turning to third-party support.  One such expert is Information Week’s Bob Evans, who wrote an “open letter” to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison explaining why Oracle needs to change its ways. 

Evans made some interesting points in his plea to Ellison. First, he says that even if Oracle doesn’t change the fee structure, it should at least change its name, since Oracle has admitted that the fees are actually used for product development rather than maintenance. 

He also asks Ellison to move away from his traditional, rigid maintenance fee system in these changing times — because if not, it will hurt Oracle in the future:

“The longer you dig in and tell CIOs that you’re not interested in the wicked expense challenges they’re facing, the longer they’re going to remember that when the current recessionary climate fades and new alternatives gain strength,” Evans writes.

At such a high price, how does Oracle maintenance even rate among its customers? One user quoted in the Information Week article, the CIO of Santa Fe Natural Tobacco, complains of poor and slow service from Oracle’s global support center. But just a couple of months ago, Oracle support received high marks in a UK Oracle Users Group survey.

Oracle isn’t the only company with high maintenance fees. SAP recently announced that it will increase the fees for SAP Basic Support customers — who currently pay 17% of net licensing fees – to 22% by 2012, right in line with Oracle. But according to Forrester analyst Ray Wang, with SAP you’ll actually be getting more when paying more, unlike its competitors.

Are you getting what you pay for from Oracle maintenance fees?

What’s your New Year’s Oracle resolution?

Cloud computing, OBIEE, Oracle certifications, security, middleware or open source projects….on what should you focus your Oracle-related efforts in 2009?

It’s a question that many Oracle customers are asking now, as a new year often means time for a new or revised Oracle strategy. SearchOracle.com recently talked to some Oracle industry analysts for tips on crafting such a plan, and the experts’ suggestions included putting security, automation and middleware decisions at the top of your New Year’s resolutions list.    

These lists have already begun showing up in the blogosphere. So, what are some Oracle gurus resolving to do in 2009?

Database developer Chet Justice has four resolutions for the new year: Go the entire year without losing his job, become proficient in OBIEE, build a PL/SQL test harness and contribute something tangible to the Oracle community.

Dan McGhan, however, has different goals, which include becoming an Oracle 11g Database Administrator Certified Associate and completing a new open source project after a previously failed attempt. 

Michael Sheehan of XML journal thinks this is an important year to focus on cloud computing. He offers his own suggestions, including taking some time to both understand what it is and research different cloud computing providers.

Your Oracle New Year’s resolutions obviously depend on your own job and experiences. However, whether or not you accomplish your resolutions also depends on what Oracle accomplishes this year.

For example, Senior Analyst Chris Wolf came up with a New Year’s resolution not for himself, but for Oracle. Wolf thinks 2009 is the time for the software vendor to “publicly define official support and offer virtual CPU-based licensing for all prominent x86 virtualization environments.”

We’ll be posting a story later this week on what some other users have outlined as their goals for 2009. What do you think Oracle should resolve to do in 2009? What are your own Oracle-related resolutions for the new year and how do you plan to accomplish them?

Oracle could get serious about SaaS in a recession

As the economy continues to fall into recession, we’ve already examined ways in which it may affect both the Web 2.0 business and Oracle’s acquisition strategy.

But now, another question is emerging, this time about an industry that has already been publicly denounced by Oracle head Larry Ellison and predicted to “collapse” by Lawson Software CEO Harry Debes.

Maybe Ellison and Debes should take a closer look — could our current economic state actually be beneficial to big-business software-as-a-service (SaaS)?

That’s what some experts are predicting. While the down economy may make businesses reluctant to commit to SaaS in the short term, the recession will probably be good for SaaS (especially for the larger, publicly-owned software vendors) in the long term, according to this Mercury News article, Economic crisis both a threat and an opportunity to SaaS.

The article also foresees a possible SaaS “shakeout,” where the smaller, sub-$20 million revenue companies will have a hard time surviving, and the big names like NetSuite and Salesforce.com will come out on top.

How does Oracle fit into all this?

Just because it doesn’t have a clear-cut SaaS strategy and doesn’t focus on SaaS like NetSuite or Salesforce, doesn’t mean it’s not a player in the market.

First of all, Ellison owns a majority stake in NetSuite. Second of all, the software giant itself can pose a threat to even the top SaaS companies. In today’s Information Week article, Salesforce CEO Benioff Sinks Teeth Into Non-SaaS Rivals, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says that out of his company’s big application rivals (SAP, Oracle and Microsoft), he thinks Oracle will pose the biggest threat as a SaaS provider.

“‘When you see [Larry Ellison] coming out so strongly against cloud computing, you know he’s worried,’ Benioff said, noting that Ellison is a student of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War — when weak, feign strength,” according to the Information Week article. “It’s also worth noting that Ellison, Benioff’s former boss at Oracle, owns a chunk of Salesforce, so Benioff isn’t so quick to slag off his former master as he is to diss Microsoft and SAP,” the article continued.

Oracle may be seen as a threat, but is what they offer really SaaS? According to Information Week’s Mary Hayes Weier, “sort of.”  It’s a tough question, because, as Weier points out, the definition of software-as-a-service remains somewhat ambiguous.

It seems as though Oracle wants to be a player in the SaaS market, but not at the expense of having to change its profitable structure — which includes license and maintenance fees. As Weier puts it, Oracle has no plans to “mess with the cash cow,” and wants to stay in the software business, being the “go-to infrastructure vendor for software companies providing SaaS to their customers.”   

SaaS has recently been an area of innovation for many smaller companies, but in this economy, it looks like Oracle — which has laid rather low in the industry thus far — and the other big names might still come out on top.   

Exadata: At what price?

For all the secrecy leading up to Oracle’s release of Exadata, the HP-Oracle appliance rolled out on the stage at OpenWorld, plenty of confusion remains.

Namely, just how much does it cost?

Typically, pricing information isn’t that hard to come by. Yet when I asked an Oracle PR rep about the Exadata pricing structure last month, instead of a simple number I was directed to a video of Larry Ellison’s keynote address (28:20 specifically), where Ellison cited the price as $650,000 for the machine and $1,680,000 for the software license.

Of course, Oracle pricing is seldom a simple affair — or any enterprise technology pricing for that matter.

Indeed, Larry Ellison’s boast that the new machine is far cheaper than competitors Netezza and Teradata, has come under scrutiny. Exadata is more like $5.5 million than $2.3 million, according to ComputerWorld.

In fact, a number of bloggers have expressed some confusion over the new Oracle pricing, despite how simple it may look on Oracle’s Exadata price list. Curt Monash posted his own Exadata pricing spreadsheet on his blog and estimates the list price at $5,546,000 and per-terabyte prices of $60,000 and $198,000 for the two configurations offered. Monash notes that that is still an incomplete picture because questions remain over what software needs to be purchased on the server side and how much data fits into an Exadata cell anyway.

Whatever the final number, it’s a pretty steep price, no matter how big the powerful the appliance — especially in this economy.

Of course, with Oracle everything is open to negotiation. 

OpenWorld: A big week for Oracle or much ado about nothing?

Another OpenWorld has come and gone - - and as always, Oracle had plenty of big announcements.

Or, did they?

The software giant announced its entrance into the appliance market with the Exadata product line, revealed Beehive, its new collaborative platform, and gave other updates on Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, cloud computing, partnerships and more. While this news excited some, others - - like CIO.com blogger Thomas Wailgum, who called OpenWorld a “SnoozeFest” - - just didn’t see what the big deal was.

Many attendees were actually more disappointed about what wasn’t said than what was. As many bloggers asked, where were the Fusion-related announcements? We didn’t learn much, except for that the first suite of Fusion Applications may not ship until 2010. As pointed out in in this News York Times article, while Oracle was forthcoming with its cloud computing plans, it remained tight-lipped on Fusion Apps:

“Chuck Rozwat, Oracle’s head of product development, largely deflected questions about hotly anticipated technologies such as Fusion Applications during a Q&A session with reporters at the OpenWorld conference,” wrote IDG News service reporter Chris Kanaracus.

Also missing was any news on a second release of Oracle 11g. Besides the fact that 11g R2 is about to start its beta program, there were no major announcements on the release and no features were revealed, to the disappointment of many.

Here are some other takes on what did and didn’t work at OpenWorld 2008:

Ellison’s keynote and the Exadata announcement:

• Peter Scott at Rittman Mead Consulting: “For strange people like me, people that see the world as moving large amounts of data around, it was exciting news. For me, data retrieval and storage are bulk processes and need to be achieved in way that does not swamp the capacity of that weak link, IO bandwidth.”

• CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum: “…Ellison’s odd keynote on Oracle’s new hardware and branding partnership with HP? Sorry. Boring!”

• Former Gartner Analyst Vinnie Mirchandani: “About the speech, though - what was fascinating was there was no mention of Fusion - or indeed any of the Beehive or “social” CRM apps Oracle showcased earlier in week. No shots at Oracle’s major competitors - SAP, Microsoft or soon to be Cisco in the collaboration space. Instead he picked on Teradata and Netezza?”

• Tim from Oracle-Base: I think I’m in the minority when I say I was a little underwhelmed by the keynote yesterday. I’m sure there are many positive points about Oracle Exadata Storage and HP Oracle Database Machine, but it all seems a little irrelevant to me.”

• Doug’s Oracle Blog: “Stuff like the HP Oracle Exadata storage appliance are exactly why I’m in this business. I love systems and new architectures and high performance. Call me crazy, but who *cares* how many customers will benefit from it.”

The Oracle Beehive Announcement:

• ZDNet’s Sam Diaz: “I’m a bit leery about getting excited over Beehive, largely because I just saw a bunch of different Web-based collaboration products showcased at the Office 2.0 conference a few weeks ago.”

• Knowledge Infusion CEO Jason Averbook: “I have seen many blogs and clips about people saying ‘nothing new, same old thing compared to Twitter and Facebook.’ One of the things that people forget is that these tools ARE NOT in most enterprises today and organizations are struggling with how to use them. Oracle’s foray into this space is very exciting as one of the way’s enterprises will adopt Web 2.0 tools is if they are tightly integrated with their daily business applications.”

Cloud computing plans:

• Matt Asay from CNet.com: “One area in which Oracle did shine was in CEO Larry Ellison’s shot at cloud computing, calling the infatuation with the cloud ‘complete gibberish.’”

Blogger/Press designations:

• Steve Gillmore from TechCrunchIT: “This year marks the detente between what Oracle PR calls press and what they call bloggers. Each of us media types was given a large badge with either press or blogger written in enormous red letters. I think the theory was to allow Oracle and third-party vendors to tell at 100 feet what type you were and suggest management procedures based on that triage…The basic problem is that there is actually no difference between the two designations.”

Michael Phelps’ appearance in Charles Phillips’ keynote

• Diaz: “I didn’t catch anything in the speech that would generate any real excitement. Maybe that’s why Phillips welcomed Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps to the stage. It was cool to see the scruffy-faced Phelps but what was he doing there? The only thing he really told us was that he eats, sleeps and swims all day. I kind of already figured that’s what his day was like but I didn’t expect to have it confirmed at Oracle OpenWorld.”

What about you? Who do you agree or disagree with? What are your final thoughts on Oracle OpenWorld 2008?

Andy Mendelsohn’s Top 11g features

Last summer we brought you some favorite 11g features of Oracle DBAs from around the Web. Here at Oracle OpenWorld, Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle’s senior vice president of server technologies, didn’t have much new to announce around Oracle databases.

Oracle’s been mum on any word of 11g release 2. It is recruiting beta testers here and is releasing 11.1.07, its first enhancement to 11g, however. Of course, this all may be moot tomorrow when Larry Ellison finally reveals the “game changing” database innovation that Oracle has kept close to the vest for months.

But with nothing else to talk about yesterday during his own keynote session, Mendelsohn took the chance to look back and detail some of the top feature he thinks are convincing customers to move to 11g. By the way, Oracle insists that adoption of the new database continues across the globe, including Novartis, Eli Lilly and Intermap Technologies (look for a podcast with Intermap next week on SearchOracle.com)

Performance

“This is one of the things that’s easiest to adopt,” Mendelsohn said. “You install the release you run your applications and it runs faster.”

According to Oracle, 85% of performance metrics are better on 11g than 10g.

Partitioning

It’s been around since 8.0 but this will be very compelling for people with large databases, he said.

“Optimizer can figure out which partition tables to scan and avoid multi terabytes of data and just get the few gigabytes you need,” he said.

Compression

“This one is going to be incredibly popular with customers as they move to 11g,” Mendelsohn said.

The new compression algorithm can handle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and SAP workloads.

“We believe you can almost turn on compression on all your large applications,” he said. “At query time, performance is actually better because we’re using a deduplication algorithm not a compression algorithm that’s CPU intensive.”

Cube organized materialized views

Plan to speed up your BI tools, according to Oracle.

“The cool thing about these OLAP cube materialized views is you can create an OLAP cube for appropriate star schema and dimensions and make those queries run really fast,” Mendelsohn said.

Active data guard

An effective technology for dealing with disaster recovery, active data guard creates a duplicate copy of your database at your site or a remote site.

“The one issue people have is you can’t do a lot with your standby database,” Mendelsohn said. “It lets you offload workloads from the database so you improve the performance of the primary and reduce hardware requirements of the primary and make use of all servers you have on your standby.”

Manageability

11g is now more self tuning and self managing, according to Mendelsohn.

SQL tuning is now fully automated and takes 26% less time in 31% fewer steps, he said.

Real Application Testing

“The workload capture and replay lets you automate the process of creating a regression test for a production database,” Mendelsohn said.

Is Oracle Beehive worth buzzing about?

It was the end of a long day - - nearly eight hours since Oracle publicly announced the release of Oracle Beehive - - but users were still eager to find out exactly what makes this new collaboration platform so great.

In a session on Monday that went over its allotted time slot as attendees scrambled to ask their questions, Oracle executives Sayan Chakraborty and Terry Olkin explained how the enterprise collaboration software will improve the way organizations communicate and work together.

What did they give as Beehive’s main advantages?

They discussed many - - its single point of management, scalability, open platform and security and compliance features like true delete - - but really emphasized the workspace feature, which they called the “pillar concept of Beehive.”

Beehive users have both a personal workspace and a team workspace, on which they manage contacts, tasks, calendar, messages, conferencing, documents, Wikis, and instant messages, all from a single point. The application brings all of these content types together and is supported on numerous applications: CalDAV, imap, webdav, xmpp, applemail, outlook, and the iphone, to name a few.

But is this something that has been done before?

This was the question one session attendee raised, wondering what makes the built-from-scratch Beehive special and different from companies like Microsoft and IBM, who have long been entrenched in collaboration software.

Olkin’s answer? Beehive plays on Oracle’s unique strengths - - being “integrated and secure.” It’s not a standalone technology and it leverages the rest of the Oracle ecosystem, he said.

A couple of other Q and A’s worth mentioning:

• How did Beehive get its name? (one user was curious because of the “stinging” he associated with a beehive). But Olkin had a different take on the word, which he said started out as a project name and stuck since it fit the application perfectly: “Bees are a very collaborative species; very social; communicate with each other through dance; there’s the idea that it looks like a lot of chaos but it’s really actually organized… and in the end there’s something sweet.”

• Beehive is shipping today…but are all the features included yet? Chakraborty and Olkin answered that everything is available except for web conferencing, which is still in beta and won’t be available for a month or two. But beyond that, there is such a long roadmap of features and capabilities that “Beehive the full product will probably never be done.”

So, what does the blogosphere think? Ashlee Vance of the New York Times is curious to see how Beehive will be received, especially since analysts at Gartner “chided Oracle in a research note for trying and failing at the ‘collaboration’ market twice.” Roger Smith of Information Week says he takes issue with Gartner’s negative assessment of Beehive, and urges companies with compelling security requirements to take a closer look and consider the product.

More importantly, what do you think? Do you plan on purchasing Beehive? Do you think it will live up to its hype?

IOUG’s new chief gets competitive

“How many people have a (data) warehouse today?”

Almost all hands shot up when Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) president and data warehousing expert Ian Abramson asked this question to a packed room of about 150 people Monday at Oracle OpenWorld.

Chances are, if all OpenWorld attendees had been present, the number of raised hands may have been well into the 30,000’s. But since it’s impossible to attend all 1,800 OpenWorld sessions, I have some highlights and tips from Abramson’s talk, “Oracle 11g database features for your data warehouse needs.”

Abramson told the audience that the key to data warehousing is being able to “compete effectively in today’s challenging environment.”  So, which Oracle tools and features help to do this?

Here are just a few of many :

Partitioning: The partition option has been around since Oracle 8 and is the key enabling function for managing large volumes of data. Partitioning methods include list, range (best for fact-based data), hash (best for more dimensional data) and composite (this has been expanded in 11g and includes range/hash and list/range combinations). Abramson also pointed to recent partitioning improvements that include greater manageability, compression enhancements and the release of the Oracle Warehouse Builder for ETL. 

Virtual Columns: The virtual columns feature is a completely new function with Oracle 11g. These columns are purely virtual and stored as metadata only. Read this tip from SearchOracle.com to learn how virtual columns can improve database manageability, availability and performance.

Information lifecycle management: Far fewer people raised their hands to say they used information lifecycle management (ILM) than said they had a data warehouse. ILM is a series of processes that, as Abramson says, “allows you to invest your storage dollars more effectively.” ILM goes far beyond simple database storage automation and allows users to specify different storage policies for different sets of data.

Security: Abramson said it clearly: “You want it, you need it, you better have it.” This message should not be taken lightly, especially since the release of “scary” findings from an IOUG security survey. The findings show that about 20 % of people are expecting their database to be hacked into in the next year - - and the majority isn’t taking the appropriate measures (encryption, database triggers, etc) to prevent it from happening

I later sat down with Abramson to discuss these survey findings, including the risks that internal sources pose to database security. Abramson also talks about his vision for IOUG, what he hopes members will take away from the conference and the results of another IOUG survey on IT salaries. Stay tuned to SearchOracle OpenWorld coverage for a chance to listen to this podcast - - and catch up on other sessions you may have missed!