No Innovation in the Oracle Database?

The other day I overheard a conversation which basically concluded that Oracle has not shown any innovation in the Oracle Database lately. I was stunned and silently asked myself how one could possibly think that!?

So, today I would like you to meet a few people (virtually for now), one of them is Wilson Chan, as an example of who drives innovation in the Oracle Database. Wilson does not represent the whole of the Oracle Database, but as one of the Software Architects for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and having been with the company for 22 years, he represents quite a bit of history as well as what (who) drives innovation in the Oracle Database till today. Here you can see him standing in front of some of his patents (see also title picture) that he got granted over the years, some of them only this year. Based on his and his team's ideas, Oracle RAC has entered a whole new era with Oracle Database 19c compared to when it was first introduced with Oracle Database 9i or even compared to Oracle Database 11g Rel. 2, as I presented here: https://www.slideshare.net/MarkusMichalewicz/oracle-rac-roadmap-for-new-features and described here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/2019-year-upgrade-markus-michalewicz/

Wilson is not the only Oracle employee who has (literally) "a wall full of patents". Many others that I unfortunately cannot list here contribute to a wealth of innovation that constantly goes into the Oracle Database, but not everybody cares to decorate their office with patents as you can see below. That does not mean their contributions are less valuable!

Patents are also not the only measurement of innovation. Sometimes great ideas come in small features und in Oracle Database 12c, there were over 700 of those features, that have matured in Oracle Database 19c, attesting to Oracle's technological advantage; more details here: https://www.slideshare.net/MarkusMichalewicz/why-to-use-an-oracle-database.

Oracle does not only innovate in traditional areas or within their own products, such as Oracle RAC, which is an industry-leading scalability and High Availability (HA) solution unique to the Oracle Database. Based on customer demand and industry as well as technology trends, Oracle is quick in adopting and improving new and alternative technologies as well as architectures.

In this context, I would like to introduce Mark Dilman. Mark is a Senior Director of development who has been with Oracle for a little longer than 18 years. Mark is currently responsible for Oracle Database Sharding as well as Global Data Services (GDS) to only name his current main projects. Those projects aim to enhance the Oracle Database with an alternative High Availability and Scalability solution for a new generation of applications that need ultra high availability, data sovereignty, geographical distribution as well as linear scalability. Unlike Oracle RAC, which strives to be fully transparent to the application when scaling, Oracle Sharding requires the application to adapt to the sharded database. However, once the application has been modified to be shard-aware, linear scalability and ultra-high availability (across geographical boundaries / regions) can be guaranteed.

"Sharding" is not a new database concept, neither unique to Oracle. However, thanks to Mark and his team's innovative ideas Oracle is the only RDBMS which has implemented native sharding in that users can simply issue a "CREATE SHARDED TABLE" command and "all the magic" happens behind the scenes. This makes Oracle Sharding easy to adopt and eliminates some of the inherent limitations of generic sharding. More information about Oracle Sharding can be found here: https://oracle.com/goto/sharding

Speaking of architectures, introducing a brand new architecture that enables cost savings by facilitating consolidation clearly should be considered innovation. Therefore, please, meet Kumar Rajamani. Kumar is a 20-years Oracle veteran and currently a Vice President of development, but most importantly, Kumar and his team are the force behind Oracle Multitenant also known as Pluggable Databases (PDBs). PDBs have not only become an important architectural improvement for the Oracle Database, they address many operational problems that Oracle's customers face on a daily basis. Providing online cloning, online refresh as well as relocation as part of the architecture, PDBs address database lifecycle management as well as consolidation and general management (manage many-as-one) challenges at the same time.

It is therefore no surprise that Oracle's first Autonomous Database implementation, today known as Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, as well as the Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) serverless deployment use PDBs. They are also used in the context of ATP dedicated deployments in order to assist with the formerly mentioned tasks that PDBs inherently address. Last but not least, Autonomous Databases use Oracle RAC!

Why Am I Telling You All This and Why Now?

I am telling you this to show that Oracle continues to innovate through its people! Wilson, Mark and Kumar are only three out of thousands of Oracle employees who ensure that Oracle as a whole and the Oracle Database in particular keep on innovating

to help people see data in new ways, discover insights & unlock endless possibilities.

The list of people contributing to Oracle's innovation is easily extendable. Tirthankar Lahiri and team "have everything In-Memory"; Kothanda Umamageswaran and team lay the foundation with Exadata facilitating the world-famous Exadata storage and Rich Long's team's Automatic Storage Management (ASM); Wei Hu and team keep the database running with various High Availability technologies and looking into new, emerging & cutting edge technologies; Sam Ravindran and team enable zero downtime Fleet Patching and Provisioning; Sanjay Singh's RAC Pack team helps customers to be successful with Zero Downtime Migration, while Lawrence To and team are the brain behind Oracle's industry-leading Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA). Last but not least, Sandesh Rao and team apply Machine Learning for better diagnosability of the Oracle Database (and more) as part of Oracle's Autonomous Health Framework - the only Oracle product other than the Autonomous Database that carries the "autonomous" adjective.

Why am I telling you this now? Because you could meet all of them and many more of the people that drive innovation and exciting new Oracle products and their product managers as well as my team (may I shamelessly add), at Oracle OpenWorld 2019!

Update

Unfortunately, Oracle OpenWorld 2019 is over and hence, you may have missed this opportunity. In this case, you can download some of the slide decks from my slide share: https://www.slideshare.net/MarkusMichalewicz or attend a local Oracle OpenWorld:

• Oracle OpenWorld Middle East (Dubai)- 14-15 January 2020
• Oracle OpenWorld Europe (London) - 12-13 February 2020
• Oracle OpenWorld Asia (Singapor) - 21-22 April 2020
• Oracle OpenWorld Latin America (S?o Paulo) - 17-18 June 2020

During which all of the following features should be discussed one way or another. Or you can also see a recording of Mauricio's and my session here: youtu.be/AiENW2VwoXY

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the opinions of the company for which I work (Oracle) by any means. I know that I missed a lot of people that deserve to be mentioned here! My apologies in advance.

Tags: #Oracle #database #RDBMS #oraclecloud #thinkautonomous #MAA #RAC #HighAvailability #HA #availability #scalability #sharding #architectures #fundamentals #technology #innovation #features #MachineLearning #cloud #dba #developer #OOW19