It is well known that hardware advances always precede advances in software technology, and this is especially true for Oracle. As hardware becomes faster and cheaper, Oracle professionals change the ways in which we process information. Changes in hardware affect the way we design databases, the way we implement database and most importantly, the way that we tune databases.
While the costs of a DBA have remained relatively constant over the past 30 years, the costs of hardware have fallen dramatically, leading to a condition where applying hardware resources is often faster and cheaper than applying human resources to fix an acute performance problem. To read more about this, click below:
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This change in the costs of people vs. hardware has led to a technique called "throwing hardware at a problem". Even though hardware may not address the root cause of an acute performance problem, it's often the smart thing to do for these reasons:
* Hardware upgrades can be done fast, in just a few hours. Root cause fixes can take months.
* Hardware upgrades have very little risk. Re-designing an Oracle system can be very risky.
* Hardware upgrades are a cheaper, guaranteed fix. You can cache a 100 gigabyte database on SSD for under $100,000, while a root cause fix may cost millions of dollars.
Read below to get the fascinating story about how hardware advances precede Oracle advances:
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See here how hardware advances will change the Oracle job roles:
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How hardware advances drive Oracle DBMS advances
How to avoid an Oracle layoff
In this down economy, companies are forced to make tough decisions. Layoffs have become commonplace, even among Oracle professionals. When a corporation is forced to trim their Oracle professional workforce, they commonly hire outside risk assessment advisors to determine which people are to be laid off.
I have participated in this unsavory process on many occasions, where I am charged with determining which Oracle employees will retain their jobs and which will be terminated. This process generally starts with an unobtrusive analysis of the Oracle professionals and includes the obvious criteria like measuring the quality and quantity of their work product; however, we also look at habits, e-mail habits and web surfing histories.
The goal is to identify those professionals who are indispensible to the ongoing success of the database and separate out those who contribute less to the bottom line. This is especially challenging when evaluating Oracle DBAs because one of the hallmarks of a good DBA is a database that rarely experienced an unplanned outage. Hence, the best DBAs are often those who have automated their tasks and use carefully crafted jobs to monitor and tune their workloads.
Read below some important tips for avoiding layoffs and getting fired from an Oracle job:
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Are you ready for Business Intelligence?
Changes in hardware technology always precede changes in software technology, and Oracle is no exception. As disk platter devices experience an unprecedented fall in cost, disk has become insanely cheap, with over a terabyte available for under $10,000.00. As a direct result of this hardware priced change, Oracle DBAs are being told to keep larger and larger amounts of historical data and to start providing management with tools to analyze and leverage this critical business information. This process is called Oracle business intelligence.
All Oracle databases collect information about ongoing business processes and it is only a matter of time before management starts to seek specialized information about their data. Eventually, all Oracle DBAs are faced with these requests for analysis of operational data, and these requests form the foundation of Oracle data warehousing and business intelligence.
As disk becomes insanely inexpensive, business managers are now choosing keep their operational data over years and use this valuable data to help them with basic Oracle business intelligence, the planning and execution of business analysis processes. Let’s take a quick look at the stages of this evolution into Oracle business intelligence:
- Data collection – This phase involved the ETL (Extract, test and Load) processes, taking operational data and saving it for analysis. The Oracle Data Warehouse Builder tool provides a framework for business intelligence, allowing for data extraction and loading of advanced data warehouse applications.
- Summary and aggregation – Managers start the business intelligence process by making requests for summaries and rollups of critical business metrics.
- Predictive analytics – At this stage, business intelligence requests become more sophisticated, and management will ask the DBA to extract historical data and make predictions using regression techniques.
- Hypothesis testing – As the managers begin to see the value of their data they will start requesting advanced business intelligence, full-blown modeling and the capability to perform hypothesis testing.
Sooner or later, all Oracle DBAs will be asked to perform business intelligence tasks and all Oracle professionals should become familiar with the common BI tools and techniques for Oracle business intelligence operations. See the link below for more details:
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