Best of 2023: Getting Started with Oracle Database

In today’s digital economy, data is a form of capital. Given the mission-critical role that it has, having a robust data management strategy is now more crucial than ever.   Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Kay Malcolm, as they talk about the various Oracle Database offerings and discuss how to actually use them to efficiently manage data across a diverse but unified data tier.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Ranbir Singh, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi there. If you’ve been following along with us these past few weeks, you’ll know we’ve been revisiting our most popular episodes of the year.  Lois: Right, and today’s episode is the last one of the Best of 2023 series. It’s a throwback to our conversation on Oracle’s Data Management strategy and offerings with Kay Malcolm, Senior Director of Database Product Management at Oracle. Nikita: We’d often heard Kay say that Oracle’s data management strategy is simply complete and completely simple. And so we began by asking her what she meant by that. 01:09 Kay: It's a fun play on words, right? App development paradigms are in a rapid state of transformation. Modern app development is simplifying and accelerating how you deploy applications. Also simplifying how data models and data analytics are used. Oracle data management embraces modern app development and transformations that go beyond technology changes. It presents a simply complete solution that is completely simple. Immediately you can see benefits of the easiest and most productive platform for developing and running modern app and analytics. 01:54 Kay: Oracle Database is a converged database that provides best of breed support for all different data models and workloads that you need. When you have converged support for application development, you eliminate data fragmentation. You can perform unique queries and transactions that span any data and create value across all data types and build into your applications.  02:24 Nikita: When you say all data types, this can include both structured and unstructured data, right? Kay: This also includes structured and unstructured data. The Oracle converged database has the best of breed for JSON, graph, and text while including other data types, relations, blockchain, spatial, and others. Now that we have the ability to access any data type, we have various workloads and converged data management that supports all modern transactional and analytical workloads. We have the unique ability to run any combination of workloads on any combination of data. Simply complete for analytics means the ability to include all of the transactions, including key value, IoT, or Internet of Things, along with operational data warehouse and lake and machine learning. 03:27 Kay: Oracle's decentralized database architecture makes decentralized apps simple to deploy and operate. This architecture makes it simple to use decentralized app development techniques like coding events, data events, API driven development, low code, and geo distribution. Autonomous Database or ADB now supports the Mongo database API adding more tools for architectural support. Autonomous Database or ADB has a set of automated tools to manage, provision, tune, and patch. It provides solutions for difficult database engineering with auto indexing and partitioning and is elastic. You can automatically scale up or down based on the workload. Autonomous Database is also very productive. It allows for focus on the data for solving business problems. ADB has self-service tools for analytics, data access, and it simplifies these difficult data engineering architectures. 04:43 Lois: OK…so can you tell us about running modern apps and analytics? Kay: Running applications means thinking about all the operational concerns and solving how to support mission-critical applications. Traditionally, this is where Oracle excels with high availability, security, operational solutions that have been proven over the years. Now, having developer tools and the ability to scale and reduce risk simplifies the development process without having to use complex sharding and data protection. Mission-critical capabilities that are needed for the applications are already provided in the functionality of the Oracle Data Management architecture. Disaster recovery, replication, backups, and security are all part of the Oracle Autonomous Database. 05:42 Kay: Even complex business-critical applications are supported by the operational security and availability of Oracle ADB. Transparently, it provides automated solutions for minimizing risk, dealing with complexity, and availability for all applications. Oracle's big picture data management strategy is simply complete and completely simple with the converged database, data management tools, and the best platform. It is focused on providing a platform that allows for modern app development across all data types, workloads, and development styles. It is completely scalable, available, and secure, leveraging the database technologies developed over several years. And it's available consistently across the environment. It is the simplest to use because of the available tools and running completely mission critical applications. 06:50 Nikita: Ah, so that’s how we come to… Kay: Simply complete and completely simple. Easy to remember and easy to incorporate into your existing architectures.  Lois: OK. So Kay, can you talk a little bit more about Autonomous Database? 07:04 Kay: Let's compare Autonomous Database to how you ran the database on premise. How you ran the database on the cloud using our earlier Cloud Services, Database Cloud Services, and Oracle Exadata Cloud Service. The key thing to understand is Autonomous Database, or ADB, is a fully managed service. We fully manage the infrastructure. We fully manage the database for you. In on premise, you manage everything-- the infrastructure, the database, everything. We also have a service in between that that we call a co-managed service. Here we manage the infrastructure, and you manage the database. That service is important for customers who are not yet up to 19c. Or they might be running a packaged application like E-Business Suite. But for the rest of you, ADB is really the place you want to go. 08:09 Nikita: And why is that? Kay: Because it's fully managed and, because it's fully managed, is a much, much lower cost way to go. So when you talk to your boss about why he wants to move to ADB, they often care about the bottom line. They want to know like, am I going to lower my costs? And with ADB, because we take care of a lot of the tedious chores that DBAs normally have to do and because we take care of best practices, configurations, we can do things at a really low cost.  08:49 Lois: Kay, what does it take for a customer to move to Oracle’s Autonomous Database?  Kay: We've got a tool that helps you look at your current database on prem. This tool will analyze what features you're using and let you know, hey, you know you're doing something that's not supported for ADB, for example. Like if you're running some release before 19c, we don't support it. If you're doing stuff like putting database tables in the system or sys schema, we don't support it. You know, there are a few things that very few customers do that we don't support. And this tool will flag those for you. And then the next step, it's pretty simple. You just use our Data Pump import/export tool to move your data out of your database on prem into the object store on the Cloud. And then you simply import-- you know how to use Data Pump to import-- the data off the file and the object store into the database. Then you're done. Pretty simple process. 09:57 Nikita: Do we assist our customers with data migration from on-prem to Cloud? Kay: More recently have come out with a new service on our Cloud called the Database Migration Service. With Autonomous Database Migration Service, you can just point us at your source database on prem or even on some other cloud. Whatever it is, we will take care of everything from there and move that, go through all the steps and move your database to ADB on the Cloud. Even better, we now are working with our Applications customers to make it really easy for them to move their packaged applications to Autonomous Database. The Oracle development teams that built JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel have now all certified that those packaged applications can run with Autonomous Database no problem. Our EBS team is working on it. And that'll be coming soon, sometime next year. 11:02 Lois: So, if I am an Apps customer, is there a special service for me? Kay: We have a fully managed service available on our Cloud that lets you take your entire application stack on the middle tier and the database tier, move it to our Cloud. Move the database part to Autonomous Database. And they will also manage your middle tier for you. 11:32 Want to get the inside scoop on Oracle University? Head on over to the all-new Oracle University Learning Community. Attend exclusive events. Read up on the latest news. Get first-hand access to new products and stay up-to-date with upcoming certification opportunities. If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started. Join the community today! 12:11 Nikita: Welcome back! Kay, can you talk a bit about APEX?  Kay: We have this great tool called APEX or Application Express. We have a version of Autonomous Database just for any APEX application.  Well, APEX is a low-code tool. It is our low-code tool that lets you rapidly build data-driven applications where the data is in the Oracle Database, really easy and really rapidly. We estimate at least 10 times faster than doing traditional coding to build your applications. What we're seeing is much, much higher productivity than that. Sometimes 40, even 50 times faster coding. 13:01 Kay: Out of the box, it comes with really nice tools for building things-- your classical forms and reporting kinds of workloads. It gives you things like faceted search and capabilities to do things like see on an e-commerce website where you get to choose things like dimensions, like I want a product where the cost is in this range. And, you know, it might have some other attributes. And it can very quickly filter that data for you and return the best results. And it's a really nice tool for iterating. Now, if your user interface doesn't look quite right, it's very easy to tweak colors and backgrounds and themes. Another reason it's so productive is that the whole middle tier part of your application is fully automated for you. You don't have to do anything about connection management or state management. You don't have to worry about mapping data types from some other 3GL programming language to data types. All of that is done for you. The combination of ADB and APEX really rocks. 14:17 Lois: Do we have Extract, Transform, and Load capabilities in our ADB? Kay: We have ETL transformation tools. Again, they let you specify transformations in a drag-and-drop fashion on the screen. We have all sorts of other tools and, in the service, the full power of the converged analytic technologies, things like graph analytics, spatial analytics, machine learning. All of this is built into this new platform. Now, a big, new capability around machine learning is something that we call AutoML. That lets any data scientists give us a data set, tell us what the key feature is that they want to analyze, and what the predictions are. And we will come up with a machine learning model for them out of the box. Really that easy. Plus, we have the low-code tool APEX that I mentioned earlier. 15:17 Kay: So this environment is really powerful for doing more than traditional data warehouses. We can build data lakes. We are integrated with the object stores on Oracle Cloud and also on other clouds. And we can do massively parallel querying of data in the core database itself and the data lake. 15:38 Nikita: Beyond the database tech, there’s the business side, right? How easy do we make a customer’s path to ADB from a business standpoint, a decision-making standpoint? Kay: So if you're an existing Oracle customer, you have an existing Oracle Database license you're using on prem, we have something called BYOL, Bring Your Own License, to OCI. We have the Cloud Lift Service. This huge cloud engineering team across all regions of the world will help you move your existing on-prem database to ADB for free. 16:16 Kay: And then, finally, we announced fairly recently something called the Support Rewards Program. This is something our customers are really excited about. It lets them translate their spending on OCI to a reduction in their support bill. So if you're a customer using OCI, you get a $0.25 to $0.33 reward for every dollar you spend on Oracle's Cloud. You can then take that money from your rewards and apply it to your bill for customer support, for your technology support even, like the database. And this is exactly what customers want as they move their investment to the cloud. They want to lower the costs of paying for their on-prem support. Now, we've talked about money. This lowers costs greatly. So ADB has lots of value. But the big thing I think to think about is really that it lowers costs. It lowers that cost via automation, higher productivity, less downtime, all sorts of areas.   17:22 Lois: You make a very convincing case for ADB, Kay. Kay: ADB is a great place to go. Take those existing Oracle Databases you have. Move and modernize them to a modern cloud infrastructure that's going to give you all the benefits of cloud, including agility and lower cost. So on our Cloud, we have something called the Always Free Autonomous Database Service. This service lets you get your hands on ADB. Try it out for yourself. You don't have to believe what we claim about how great this technology is. And we have other technologies like Live Labs that you can find on developer.oracle.com/livelabs that lets you do all kinds of exercises on this Always Free ADB infrastructure. Really get your hands dirty. And see for yourself how productive it can be.  18:16 Nikita: Thanks, Kay, for telling us about ADB and our database offerings. To learn more about this, head over mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started on our free Oracle Cloud Data Management Foundations Workshop. Lois: We hope you’ve enjoyed revisiting some of our most popular episodes these past few weeks. We’re kicking off the new year with a new season of the Oracle University Podcast. And this time around, it’ll be on Oracle Autonomous Database so make sure you don’t miss it. Until next week, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 18:52 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.