DBA Or DBRE, That Is the Question Data, Data
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Vol. 32, No. 2 · MAY 2018 The Cloud Is the DBA or DBRE, That Data, Data, Database! is the Question Everywhere Preuss and Srivastava present a How do you plead? Smart grids to the rescue powerful paradigm. See page 6. See page 17. See page 4. Much more inside . The New Phoenix by Axxana For Oracle Databases and Applications Zero Data Loss Synchronous Protection at Unlimited Distances at Maximum Performance • Low Cost Replication Lines • Shortest Recovery Time • Full Consistency Across Multiple Databases www.axxana.com Professionals at Work 2018 NoCOUG Board irst there are the IT professionals who write for the Journal. A very Dan Grant Exhibitor Coordinator special mention goes to Brian Hitchcock, who has written dozens of Eric Hutchinson book reviews over a 12year period. The professional pictures on Webmaster Fthe front cover are supplied by Photos.com. Iggy Fernandez President, Journal Editor Next, the Journal is professionally copyedited and proofread by veteran copy Jeff Mahe editor Karen Mead of Creative Solutions. Karen polishes phrasing and calls out Vice President misused words (such as “reminiscences” instead of “reminisces”). She dots every Kamran Rassouli Social Director i, crosses every t, checks every quote, and verifies every URL. Liqun Sun Then, the Journal is expertly designed by graphics duo Kenneth Lockerbie Brand Ambassador and Richard Repas of San Franciscobased Giraffex. Michael Cunningham Director of Special Events And, finally, David Gonzalez at Layton Printing Services deftly brings the Journal to life on an offset printer. Naren Nagtode Secretary, Treasurer, President Emeritus This is the 126th issue of the NoCOUG Journal. Enjoy! s Roy Prowell —NoCOUG Journal Editor Director of Publicity and Marketing Saibabu Devabhaktuni Table of Contents Conference Chair Tu Le Interview ............................................................. 4 ADVERTISERS Speaker Coordinator Book Excerpt....................................................... 6 Axxana ............................................................... 2 Volunteers Quest ................................................................15 Brian’s Notes .................................................... 12 Tim Gorman Board Advisor Product Review .................................................17 OraPub ............................................................ 28 Brian Hitchcock Treasurer’s Report ...........................................27 Book Reviewer Publication Notices and Submission Format ADVERTISING RATES The NoCOUG Journal is published four times a year by the Northern California The NoCOUG Journal is published quarterly. 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What I don’t get is why I need to change my data- choose to buy readymade products that just need to be heated base technology? and served. You can also buy raw ingredients and have your staff This all comes down to how much you want to be in the busi chop, prepare, and cook them. There’s a lot of grey area in be ness of managing and nurturing servers—physical, bare metal, tween. You have to identify what type of restaurant you are. For virtual, or any other type. Cloudnative database services make example, is it better to buy prechopped pineapple or pay some assumptions about distributed computing, storage, and network one to chop it? Is there room in your establishment to chop it? ing that databases built for an onpremises, baremetal world do Does the quality of the product you can buy prechopped make not. These cloudnative assumptions yield systems that employ a difference to the end customer? much higher levels of automation, easing the operational over The answer to a lot of these questions is “It depends.” The head for their end users. These cloudnative database services same is true for database technology: it depends. With managed offer serverless operations or abstract clustersizing concepts like database services, you know you’re getting a ton of performance nodes that allow you to scale as your workload grows. and a reliable service with reduced operational headache. We as an industry don’t do a terribly good job of defining the Cloud Spanner is a borninthecloud database system that categorical differences between managed cloudnative database offers manageability you associate with cloudnative services, services and database services that are built to ease operational scalability you might associate with NoSQL databases, and toil but are rooted in onpremises architectures and systems. schema and SQL you would associate with relational databases. There are many shades of grey. A Google Cloud example is that I want to say that’s awesome, but you’re describing a future we have Cloud Spanner, which is cloudnative and has very low without database administrators. maintenance and operational requirements, and Cloud SQL, which offers MySQL and Postgres compatibility but requires you I’ll let Oracle answer this one. In a recent Forbes article (www. to be involved somewhat in the operations of your database. We forbes.com/sites/oracle/2018/01/15/3-essential-dba-career- tend to call both of these “managed database services.” Where priorities-for-2018), Jeff Erickson of Oracle laid out three pri things get complicated is as you scale out. Operational overhead orities for DBAs for 2018: increases as shard or partition count increases. Cloudnative data 1. Learn What Cloud Database Services Have to Offer bases solve this scale problem natively. a. The cloud lets companies tap into new technology You have to choose what’s right for your business, but we be changes faster, since it doesn’t require a lengthy up lieve that IT and developers should be 100% focused on adding grade to add new features. DBAs can be the trailblazers value to their business. If operating a database doesn’t add value guiding their companies to those new opportunities. to your business, you should let a cloud provider like Google Cloud do that for you. If you’re just moving your database in b. [Longtime database developer Martin] D’Souza’s ad stance from an onpremises server to the cloud, you’re not taking vice is to turn that dynamic on its head: “Be the one full advantage of what the cloud can offer. It’s the difference be who knows what the cloud has to offer,” he says. “Your tween “database as a service” and “database instance as a service.” company could be thinking that an IT project will take months and tons of money, but you’ve done your Are there any analogies out there? homework and found a cloud service that will do the I like food, so let’s use a restaurant analogy. To be a successful job for like five bucks a week. You can be seen as the restaurateur, you run your restaurant like a business, not a hobby. person who saves time and money.” You’re focused on food costs, efficiency of your staff, and ulti “If you’re just moving your database instance from an on-premises server to the cloud, you’re not taking full advantage of what the cloud can offer. It’s the difference between ‘database as a service’ and ‘database instance as a service.’” 4 May 2018 “The Oracle Database documentation states that table clusters are not appropriate if the tables are frequently updated or frequently require a full table scan. Interleaved tables [in Cloud Spanner], on the other hand, are great for table scans and frequently updated tables.” 2. Teach Developers What Database Can Do for Them comes into play to route messages between nodes efficiently and a. With the growing move to a DevOps style of software quickly. Cloud Spanner truly is a fusion of hardware and software. development, [Oracle master product manager Maria] Cloud Spanner abstracts away much of the operational over Colgan sees the roles of the DBA and the application head of running a globally scalable database. You can get access developer moving closer together. to an instance in four clicks and scale that instance up or down just by saying how many nodes (a compute abstraction) you 3. Make Your Company’s Data Work in Emerging Technolo need. Storage scales as needed on demand. The system does a ton gies of optimizations on the back end to split data into partitions and a. In essence, become a data administrator, not just a data make sure that the workload is distributed evenly. base administrator. A Cloud Spanner database can contain one or more tables. b. Think about IoT, data lakes, big data, analytics, and These tables look like any other relational database table, in that how to get there. they are structured with rows, columns, and values, and they OK, I’m listening. Tell us more about the architecture of Google contain primary keys. Data in Cloud Spanner is strongly typed: Cloud Spanner Database. Just don’t use phrases like “unprece- you must define a schema for each database and that schema dented scale” and “no-compromises” and “10X faster.” must specify the data types of each column of each table. You can define multiple tables in a database, and you can optionally de Cloud Spanner is the Google Cloud Platform offering of fine parentchild relationships between tables if you want Cloud Spanner, which is a Googlebuilt, globally distributed, strongly Spanner to physically colocate their rows for efficient retrieval.