Category Archives: Oracle

Oracle CloudWorld 2024 Day 2

Posted on by Standard 2

If you missed my day 1, you can view it here.

So day 2 was registering for Oracle CloudWorld, then attending the Oracle Partner Success Summit and Oracle ACE promo video recording session in the afternoon and attending two events in the evening:
1. Oracle EMEA Welcome Reception
2. Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event

Registering for Oracle CloudWorld

The morning was spent blogging about day 1 and having breakfast.

Last year Oracle CloudWorld was split over The Venetian mainly and parts of Caesars Forum, however this year it seemed it was limited to only The Venetian with Caesars Forum for SuiteWorld. I went to The Venetian midday for registration for Oracle CloudWorld, it was starting to get busy.

However, I registered within few minutes along with my colleague Rishin.

In the corridor, I met Jeremy the American Sign Language interpreter for all the Oracle CloudWorld keynotes. I had met him first in 2022 when he did his first CloudWorld gig. Now I meet him every year and catch up. It’s really good that Oracle provide this service for the deaf and making the event inclusive.

Oracle ACE CloudWorld Promotion Video Session

Jennifer Nicholson who heads the Oracle ACE Program had asked all the ACE to come record a CloudWorld promotion video from the Oracle ACEs. So we all took part and follow Connor McDonald instructions.

Sai Penumuru on camera 😎

And Osama Mustafa!

You can watch the video here, which came out pretty decent 😎. Well done all that were involved 👍🏽

Oracle Partner Success Summit

After the Oracle ACE CloudWorld promotion video session, I headed over to the Partner Success Summit, which the doors had already open. I headed over to the front as close as I could get. The room was getting pretty full.

Leah Yomtovian, Senior Vice President, Partner and Operations Strategy was the host and welcomed us all.

She had mentioned:

  • Shifting from product oriented company to service oriented company
  • Achieve more with less
  • Win more together, succeed more together

She then welcomed Jason Maynard, Executive Vice President, Revenue Operations to the stage.

Jason, mentioned how Oracle has over 100 OCI regions.

He also mentioned, 3 success factors:

  1. Great products (innovation)
  2. More oriented to customer success
  3. Partner alignment

He talked about:

  • How partners are the ones that guide customers
  • Oracle was able to close its book in 9 days! Oracle is one of the customer success itself
  • Incorporating GenAI for account planning
  • Sales people can use time selling and less admin
  • Oracle centralises it’s Enterprise Applications when it does mergers and acquisitions, to gain efficiency and save money
  • Standardisation is key, Oracle Fusion
  • Oracle is everywhere, announcement today of the partnership on AWS!
  • Oracle at any hyper-scaler cloud provider
  • Oracle taking approach of making Oracle available everywhere
  • Bring AI to your data

He next went onto explain that AI transforms everything.

Leah then went on to talk about working with partners, ISV, to help them go to market.

She then went onto talking about partner credits.

Next she welcomed Rod Johnson, EVP, Applications North America and Mark Hura, EVP, North America Cloud Infrastructure to the stage.

Mark talked about:

  • Incredible performance and scale, with efficient costs
  • Perform at difficult scale, benefit for customers
  • 2/3rd of OCI consumption is not Oracle workload!
  • It’s not Oracle on Oracle as people perceive
  • Cost saving and flexibility
  • Economic differentiation
  • Provide customer choice on how to use Oracle infrastructure, how to optimise, most flexible deployment options
  • We live in a multi cloud, giving customer choice and flexibility
  • Oracle 23ai, enables customer to be AI data capable

Rod talked about:

  • Oracle in a category of 1, integrated suite of Enterprise Applications to allow efficient core solutions. All under one Oracle stack.
  • Applied AI, AI driven enterprise
  • AI assist model
  • We’re just at the begin, profound shift to come

Next, Leah welcomed Andy Mendelsohn, EVP, Database Server Technologies to the stage.

He talked about:

  • Oracle database founded in 1970 and still going!
  • Not many tech companies can claim their product still going that strong.
  • 98 of fortune 100 run Oracle database.
  • AI vectors search, allows search on unstructured data. Do suffocated searches.
  • Differentiators, converge database, can do all types of workloads, not just one.
  • Agility and simplicity.
  • Autonomous database, anyone at push of button can get a suffocated database.

Next, Leah welcomed Gary Miller, EVP, Customer Success Officer to the stage.

He talked about:

  • Partners said Oracle hard to navigate, Oracle is simplifying account management, to work easier with partners.
  • Customers more happy due to partners bring more customer success.
  • True partnership, is when customer can’t tell when it’s Oracle or partner.
  • Amazing technology but it’s not enough, Oracle needs partners to bring this to customers.
  • Partners have the relationships, can bring the potential, and why Oracle investing in partners.
  • Partners to be that trusted advisor.
  • Training for partners to ensure know the products.
  • Collaborative working together approach.

For the final segment, Leah welcomed Douglas Kehring, EVP, Head of Operations to the stage.

He talked about:

  • Converting our install base on existing license model to cloud licensing.
  • One of the fastest company to be able to close books and report finance earnings.
  • Oracle wants customers to achieve the same.
  • Transform from traditional on-premise to cloud product.
  • SAP, Workday, and Salesforce getting dropped by customers to go to Oracle Apps.
  • Oracle is here not to compete with partners but to work with them.
  • Win together and succeed together. New dawn.

Once the summit was over, there was a reception for the 500-600 partner delegates that I briefly attended and spoke to Steve Ramsay from Oracle and David Schmidt from Syniverse.

Oracle EMEA Welcome Reception

Richard Smith was hosting the Oracle EMEA Welcome Reception, so I thought I’d make an appearance before heading to my 2nd event of the evening. It was at the Cheri Rooftop.

It was pretty busy, but I managed to catch up the following people:

After an hour or so, I left this event to catch the remaining of the next event which was more my area and I wanted to catch up with the various Product Manager in the Database and Exadata space 😎

Oracle Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event

I decided to walk from Cheri to Madam Tussauds in the Venetian where the event was held.

I got to met Karl O’Connell, CIO of Irish Cattle Breeding Federation and a very good customer of Version 1. We manage their Exadata Cloud @ Customer / Exadata Cloud Services.

Also got to met Alex Blyth, Exadata Product Manager, who I know quite well 😊

Also got to meet some old friends from last year when I attended the same event 🤣

I also got to meet:

Dominic Giles

Gavin Parish

Martina Keippel

Tomorrow I will be attending the first day of the actual conference – looking forward to it! 😎👍🏽

You can view my day 3 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

Oracle CloudWorld 2024 Day 1

Posted on by Standard 2

If you missed my day 0, you can view it here.

As there was no Oracle EMEA Appreciation Event like the past couple of years, today was simply enjoying Las Vegas and getting over the jet lag.

Enjoying Las Vegas

First thing first, after getting up and sorting a few things out, was to get breakfast. My colleague Rishin Mitra, is staying nearby and walked over to my hotel. We went to Zeffer’s restaurant, which I have been before and recommended.

Rishin had chicken and waffles and I had french toast, massive portions!

Next, I went exploring and Rishin went back to his hotel to rehearse his presentation. He was fortunate to be selected to present 👍🏽 It was hot hot hot in Las Vegas with temperate hitting nearly 40oC 🥵

I’ve recently got into cycling and brought an eMTB, so thought I’d check out a cycle store in US to see if it had better range then UK, where I’ve struggled to get certain body armour like knee pads, etc. The nearest store was some considerable distance and pretty costly in an Uber, but I noticed in Uber app it offered me $3 for the bus, so I thought why not, it’s an experience 😊

45 minutes later, I arrive at the ‘Las Vegas’ Cyclery’.

There was a ball made out of used inner tubes 😲

After having a browse and deciding not to get anything, I went to the Fashion Show Mall back at the strip, for some window shopping and met up again with Rishin. As our breakfast, was so filling we’d both skipped lunch and thought we’d swing by Oracle CloudWorld conference to see how preparation so going on. It seemed like all ready for tomorrow.

Here’s a map of the layout of the conference, should anyone attending and be interested.

After, this we had a wonder down the LINQ promenade to look for a place to eat. We couldn’t find a place to eat, but we did wonder in this cool ‘ I LOVE SUGAR’ store which I had been to in the past.

I suggested we go to ‘The Cheese Factory’ in Caesars Palace shopping and food forum. So we had a wonder over to there and eventually ended up in ‘The Cheese Factory’.

The meal was as filling as our breakfasts! 🤦🏽‍♂️

That was the final thing we did before heading back to hotel and wrapping up the day.

Tomorrow will be registration, attending the Oracle Partner Success Summit, EMEA Welcome Reception and Database Premiere Customer Appreciation Event.

You can view my day 2 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

Oracle CloudWorld 2024 Day 0

Posted on by Standard 1

Introduction

Similarly to the past couple of years, as an Oracle Ace Pro, I’m very fortunate to be able to get a complimentary ticket to Oracle CloudWorld. Again, with my employer Version 1, covering travel, accommodation and time, which I am very grateful for, I was all set to attend Oracle CloudWorld 2024.

Fortunately this year, I don’t have any critical pre-sales work during the conference, so I will be able to more enjoy and hopefully have this blog series out in a timely manner 😎 Unlike last year where a bid dominated my visit and consequently wasn’t able to complete my blog series (apologies!).

The Trip

Saturday the 7th September (earlier than last year) and the journey begins! All packed and ready to leave Manchester for Las Vegas OCW24 😎

A gruelling 16 hours trip! Starting from Manchester Airport.

The first leg is an 8 hour long flight to New York via Virgin Atlantic!

This time it was ‘Lady Love’ that had the pleasure of taking me 😉 Bye bye Manchester!

Landed in New York, now for immigration, baggage collection/drop off and get to gate for connection flight. But as we landed early, I had 3 hours not the 1.5 hours in the past 😐

Made it to the gate in reasonable time, as there was a wait at immigration but far less then last couple of years. But annoyingly the flight to Las Vegas was delayed.

Wasn’t too bad in the end, as was only an 1.5 hours delay as the plane came in late.

I met Jerry Seager, who happened to be on my plane to Las Vegas. He was coming from Heathrow and myself from Manchester, but common 2nd leg to Las Vegas. Jerry is from Sopra Steria and is my colleague from UKOUG James Herbert‘s boss. So now the next leg is 5 hours, making up lost time to Las Vegas.

Finally made it, 16 hours later in Las Vegas. It was 2pm when I left the UK and arrived in Las Vegas 10pm local time but back home was 6am! So was starting to feel it 😴 but did manage to get a power nap on the flight which helped.

My place for the week is my usual spot of Sahara hotel, which is at the end of the Monorail (Southbound), which I’ve always chosen to keep the cost down as the central strip hotels are expensive. I went for my standard tier, but I was very fortunate this time they didn’t have that room available and gave me an complimentary upgrade to a suite 😃

Oracle usually have an Oracle EMEA Appreciation Event with the EMEA Awards on the Sunday, but they not having this year, so tomorrow will be exploring Las Vegas and preparing for CloudWorld by getting my agenda all sorted!

You can view my day 1 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

Oracle Database 23c now Oracle Database 23ai

Posted on by Standard 1

Announcement

In case you missed it, yesterday 2nd May 2024 at 5pm (GMT) Larry Ellison and Juan Loaiza announced Oracle Database 23ai under the banner of “AI + Converged Data: Oracle’s Strategy for Data Management”. You can see the announcement here:
AI and Converged Data: Oracle’s Strategy for Data Management – YouTube

I was conveniently at the UKOUG Technology Strategy Day (LinkedIn post here), where Scott Hays, Steve Ramsay, Dominic Giles and Killian Lynch plus others were. They all alluded to big announcement that evening but for obvious reasons couldn’t share the details. But in the leading hours, I had seen posts on social media with the “23ai” name, which lead me to believe the rename was going to be part of the announcement 🙂 Post 5pm, was able to speak freely with Dom and Kilian and it totally makes sense, we’re in the era of AI, it’s the latest buzz word, we were due a letter change for some while now! Oracle’s slogan is “Bring #AI algorithms to where your data lives with Oracle Database 23ai”.

Versions over the eras

8i and 9i were for the era of internet, 10g and 11g for the era of grid, and finally 12c, 18c, 19c, 21c and 23c (up to 23.3) for era of cloud. 23ai is actually from 23.4 onwards and the release that will be the mainstream General Available (GA) release.

What’s New

There so much that new, which Oracle have broken down into 3 areas, see below:

AI for Data

  • Oracle AI Vector Search
  • Oracle Exadata System Software 24ai
  • OCI GoldenGate 23ai

Accelerating App Development

  • JSON Relational Unification
  • Graph Relational Unification
  • Free Developer Databases

Mission-Critical Data

  • Oracle Globally Distributed Database with RAFT
  • Oracle True Cache
  • In-Database SQL Firewall

More details of each feature is available here.

Support

Oracle Database 19c as of writing has Extended Support (waived) is till 30th April 2026, so customers have 2 years to move from 19c to 23ai. Latest dates can be found here:
Release Schedule of Current Database Releases (Doc ID 742060.1)

Availability

Oracle Database 23ai is only available on Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, OCI Exadata Database Service, OCI Base Database Service and Azure Oracle Database Service. It also available on Always Free Autonomous Database as well for download in the Autonomous Database 23ai Container Image and Oracle Database 23ai Free. For the rest we have to wait for GA which I suspect is very imminent, weeks not months.

Where to get more info

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

UKOUG Conference 23 Day 2

Posted on by Standard 1

UKOUG Conference ’23

If you missed my day 1, you can view it here.

Last night was the UKOUG Evening Celebration ’23, and although it finished at approximately 11:30pm, it took the team and board a couple of hours to pack up, debrief and have the traditional late night takeaway as some of us get too busy with the event, we don’t get a moment to eat properly or at all 🙁

Due to the late night, I skipped the first session and arrived for second session, however decided I’d use the hour to go over my presentation as I was presenting later in the day.

I had then planned to attend Kerry Osborne session, however one problem, Kerry wasn’t there! I checked with the team and they said he was delayed getting to the venue. So I looked who was around and saw Nigel Bayliss was around, and asked if he could fill the slot with any material he had already presented recently, as we had 50-100 people in the Ozone waiting for a presentation 🙄. He suggested Dom Giles, who kindly agreed to present minutes before the start time.

It was greatly appreciated, and Dom Giles presented “Oracle Database: What’s New, What’s Coming” which is what he presented at the recent Oracle DatabaseWorld at CloudWorld:

He talked about many new features in 23c and also what was coming. One of these new features that coming, was True Cache, which is similar to Redis which you put cache in front of the application to improve performance for data that doesn’t need to be most current data:

He also spoke about performance enhancements in 23c:

Finally concluded on database release and support timeline, the key being that 19c waived extended support increased by a year and 23c projected release in early 2024:

Whilst Dom was presenting, the UKOUG team had informed me that Kerry had arrived. So I went and spoke to him, luckily the next hour slot in Ozone was free as it was lunch, so I advised the audience that once Dom was finished, that Kerry would delivery his presentation in that free slot and they were free to stay and listen.

Next I attended “How to Improve Your Ability to Solve Complex Performance Problems” by Kerry Osborne, Google:

Has he had issues with his laptop, he decided to abandon his slides but still go through the process of how to solve complex performance problem, broken down into 3 parts:

  • Explain the basic process we must go through to solve a complex performance problem
  • Discuss some of the main factors that can inhibit our efforts
  • Discuss some of the techniques we can apply to improve our chances

It was interesting to hear from his 20 years of experiences, tips and tricks as well as experiences of working with of the best performance troubleshooters in the world.

Next, I went to have a light lunch and head to my next session which is unusual for me to attend, but as I’ve heard so much about CX lately, I thought it was worthwhile attending “Innovation with Oracle Intelligent Advisor” by Leona Chauhan:

Very interesting session, where I came to understand that Oracle Intelligent Advisor is a rules engine technology that is purpose built for automating complex policies and creating tailored personalised applications. For example, a company may have a complex maternity policy, that have large ruleset, that could be converted to rules and an application created off the back of these rules that will be used to question/interview the users and provide tailored response on their entitlement. The impressive part, was the tooling can take policy document and parse them into rules, which then can be refined into the final set of rules which the application is built off.

One of the key features is it automates decision-making, carrying out complex calculations, yet has a low code interface for development. This can save thousand of hours reducing errors in applications by intelligent online interviews, which can respond automatically, giving instant decision in a downloadable letter or form, which mirrors policy or process documents.

It can be embedded within a public webpage or private intranet site and can be integrated into ERP system, which can be on-premises or cloud. It is very flexible and is instrumental in giving the best customer experience.

Next what my own session “Harnessing the power of Oracle Exadata Database Machine“:

Where I talked about the “Oracle Secret Sauce”, well more it’s just simply Brawn Hardware with Smart Software. And it’s the integration of hardware and software that sets apart Exadata from the rest, as Oracle says: “Hardware and Software: Engineered to Work Together”.

I also went through:

  • Why move to Exadata
  • The benefits
  • What’s new in X10M (see blog post here for more info)
  • Migration Challenges
  • Tips and Tricks/Best Practices
  • How to tackle database consolidation
  • Different types of Exadata offerings/Responsibility Model
  • And of course, harnessing the power of Oracle Exadata Database Machine

Once my presentation was done, I was able to relax and attended “A Practical example of implementing TDE and TLS1.2 in an Oracle 19c Data Guard Environment” by Clive Archibald, Virgin Media O2:

This was delivered by one of my clients, Clive, who I have worked for nearly 10 years on their Exadata estate supporting their Smart Metering:

He went through a comprehensive example of how Virgin Media O2 had setup TLS 1.2, using certificates Azure Key Vault to manage them. Also went through example of how TDE was implemented.

Then came the final session of the conference (the best for last 😉), which I attended “Exadata: Strategy and Roadmap for New Technologies, Cloud, and On-Premises” by Alex Blyth, Oracle:

He first spoke about what Exadata is and the vision:

He then went onto discussing Oracle Exadata Exascale:

An exciting new feature, that uses Exadata platform to cater for broad spectrum of requirements, from small configurations to large deployment:

This is similar to how Autonomous database (shared infrastructure) can be consumed from a core and 1TB storage up to thousands of cores and petabytes of storage. It’s great for hyperscale, which Alex said selfishly Oracle needed for Oracle Cloud, but is also great for customer to use in the Oracle Cloud or on-premises, to allow for flexible elastic architecture.

Also, what great is state of the art storage efficient database cloning, meaning no more Exadata Sparse Clones with test master! Actual space efficient redirect on write technology:

Exadata Exascale, will facilitate a new OCI Exadata Database Service namely ExaDB-XS:

This will provide to be very flexible, elastic and cost efficient! It’s a really interesting space, which I look forward to:

So in summary, next gen software architecture, simple, flexible, efficient, foundation for multi-tenant Exadata Database Service:

Once the presentation was over, it was a case of wrapping up the conference, working with the team removing all the branding, pack up and leaving with the conference blues 😕:

Till next time! Hope to see you all soon!

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)