Saturday, October 08, 2011

It's Enterprise and won't be cheap....

Most of OOW seemed to be about Boxes, the bigger the better. 


I'm not a DBA. The people at Pythian are, and they've said nice things about the Appliance. I think it suits their business model, which is external DBA support. If a company already has good DBAs and listens to them, it shouldn't fare too badly on getting the correct hardware setup. If it doesn't have good DBAs (or it doesn't listen to them), then it probably won't hear about the appliance, and they'll end up with some commodity kit (maybe running MySQL or even SQL Server).


The Exalytics machines is way out of my field. It is probably good. It is probably expensive. It is probably something I won't get my hands on. The same goes for the rest of this Big Data stuff. Clusters of scores of machines are expensive. 


We do have a nice NoSQL solution. I'll probably download that to play with, but it is something that is really for Java developers (or some of these newer languages that get fashionable every couple of years). I think I'll have to re-title myself as a 'Relational Database Developer'. 


So the 'cloud' bit was the part that appealed most. Not the Fusion Apps stuff. Its nice that it is finally out there, but that isn't my field either. 


Guy Harrison's tweets have included some nuggets "DB cloud service will not support direct SQL from outside oracle public cloud - stateless REST calls only." and "DB cloud service gives you a schema in a shared DB, not a whole instance like Amazon RDS. More like SQL azure than RDS"


Pricing won't be cheap. This is Enterprise Edition folks. It's not for startups trying to run a business on pizza, coke and little white pills. It is for people with big pockets. 


Roel Hartman indicates that SQL Developer 3.1 will have some special sauce that will allow you to connect to these cloudy databases. I think the twitter-stream has a screen shot, but I've lost it. [Twitter was in turbo mode the past few days - unfortunate for us down under where a lot of the action happens while we are in bed.]


Other IDEs may need to do some catching up to work with those databases. I'd also suspect that it might prove a barrier to any applications not running on Oracle's cloud too. While Java (and other JVM languages ?) might be doable, I wonder whether Forms will make the cut.


Application Express seems to be making its presence felt. Though after Larry aired his views on Salesforce, I wonder whether the "apex" name will become a battleground as a "cloud language". Hey folks, the appex.com domain name appears vacant at the moment.


Oh yes, the Social Network thing. My last company used Yammer, which was pretty similar to what Salesforce offers with Chatter, and the company I'm working at now has something similar. Yes they have a Facebook 'feel', but the focus is 'employer' related. People will have both and won't have a problem keeping them separate, mostly because your employer 'owns' one and all your friends who work elsewhere won't be there.



6 comments:

Noons said...

Yeah, Forms is basically dead.

Apex on the other hand is finally being given the time of day.

Instead of the Java non-sense that has to be re-invented/"re-factored" every time someone wants a small change in a screen. Good for Fusion. Which took only, what, 8 years to see the light of day as a product? Why was I not surprised...

At work I finally got everyone in our BI and finance team using Apex.
Instead of - wait for it - SQLDeveloper! It's such a great tool for end users, SQLDeveloper, isn't it? Particularly when someone opens a change window on a critical table and proceeds to lock it for the entire day...

"The database is running slow, I can't run this truncate that used to run in 1 second!" and other such used to be the order of the day.

Now? No more complaints. And no more exclusive DDL locks either...

But of course I and others don't know what we're doing, according to some "ace experts" out there...

sydoracle said...

The fact that a SELECT...FOR UPDATE can lock a row and only needs SELECT privileges is a bummer.
Makes it damn near impossible to actually have a READ ONLY account even if that is all you want.

That said, if the 'cloud connection' for SQL Developer 3.1 only uses a stateless RESTful connection, that could be useful

Noons said...

Let's hope so.
To be fair to SQL Developer: it IS a developer tool. NOT a end user tool.

Being a developer tool, its design makes the basic assumption the user is connected to a development instance. Which is not unreasonable!

The problem comes when folks use it against a production database, as an end user tool.

Classic situation: it puts a DDL lock on any table it has a cursor opened on. Basically, any window using that table.

Which means if a production process involves for example a DDL operation - eg drop/create an index (not entirely unreasonable in a BI/ETL environment?) - then it simply locks up production!

Until such time as someone - the "evil, expensive dba", of course - figures out WTH is going on...

Any wonder why I want it replaced by Apex anywhere I find it in use against production?

Doug Burns said...

But of course I and others don't know what we're doing, according to some "ace experts" out there...

Of course you don't Noons. I keep telling you that ;-)

Some 'ace experts' are ok, though, trust me ... but I'm happy you keep rocking the boat and I really like Gary's post too because it raises some interesting questions that made it stand out from the OOW noise ....

Cheers,

Doug

Doug Burns said...

Hey, I love jetlag! It means I can post comments on Aussie blogs in a sensible time for you chaps.

Of course, how I'm going to get on in the office today is another matter ...

sydoracle said...

Just got SQL Developer 3.1
Now I can see RMAN backups. It isn't just for developers now....