Oracle Dublin Experience Day

On November 8th, I was invited to the Dublin Experience Day, Oracle’s own event hosted in their offices at Eastpoint Business Park.
I was introduced to the latest updates from OpenWorld, including Autonomus, Security and Blockchain news.
Here are my notes on it

Oracle Digital Overview

Alan Lawless – Organizational Development – Oracle Digital

Alan, a really outgoing, extravagant lad, decided to introduce an interesting analogy between Oracle and Rolls-Royce. He felt that Oracle was kind of the Rolls-Royce of software back in the days.

You were buying an experience. Custom made product for a really limited amount of customers who wanted only the very best. Selling really expensive things to wealthy companies, mostly Fortune 500 ones. Companies that were willing to pay a premium to get the best. And it did that really well.

Enter the Cloud paradigm. For Alan, it was as if Hertz would start leasing Rolls Royce. While buying a Rolls Royce was an experience, Hertz was allowing you to detach from your car, let someone else take care of it, just enjoying the ride. And then, it would also allow you to take a Range Rover in case you needed one, or any other car if that was the case. People want things quickly, immediate.

How does Oracle tackle this issue then? By Oracle Digital. Oracle Digital is the fresh/fast/modern side of Oracle (sales). They are getting internship students, recruiting from College. 5 years ago, Oracle would recruit Rolls-Royce type of sellers, now they are focused mostly on agile, fast, young energetic sellers.
Here is a quick video about Oracle Digital:

Oracle Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure

Alexander Koening – Product Manager – Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

What is the expectancy?

• Cloud should deliver better than on premise
• Cloud should take care of things that the customer doesn’t want to take care

A simple example is security: a customer wants its data encrypted. How? He probably does’t care, he just wants to know that it is encrypted in the highest standards.

Alexander mentioned that Gen2 Cloud introduces two security concepts:

• Impenetrable Barrier: a network of dedicated computers that secure the cloud platform
• Autonomous Robots: automated threat detection and remediation

He then compared Oracle Cloud Gen 1 vs 2:

You can see that there is a separation in Gen 2 between the Bare-Metal Computer and the Cloud Control computer. You don’t have that in AWS, allowing AWS engineers to insert code to your machine.

Then he spoke about the roadmap for OCI servers. By end of next year, you will also have Zurich, Sao Paulo and many East Asia destinations.

Another interesting concepts that apparently AWS doesn’t have is the noisy neighbors avoidance. This means that you are guaranteed your network bandwidth as it will limit any other user sharing your network to not commit excesses.

Comparing AWS vs Oracle, this is what was presented:

Security

Robert Kenny – Cloud Solutions Architect / Security Evangelist

Robert said that possibly one of the customer’s main concern is security, every time.

When migrating from On Prem, most companies use multiple technologies, such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft or Google.

He made three considerations for security:

1. Hacking is not confined to the network
2. Modern attacks are not static
3. Security automation is essential

To design security concepts you have to:

1. Make it easy
2. Make it secure

A good example for this is Multi-Factor authentication.

He then said one of current problems is that network experts are limited, so shift paradigm: recruit eager people straight out of college.

Since most of the customers use multicloud solutions (in SaaS, IaaS or partner apps), it is probably a good idea to use CASB

A Cloud Access Security Broker is a software tool or service that sits between an organization’s on-premises infrastructure and a cloud provider’s infrastructure. A CASB acts as a gatekeeper, allowing the organization to extend the reach of their security policies beyond their own infrastructure. It monitor good and bad behaviour, stopping the latter. Oracle bought Palerra and is now their main CASB solution.

A final recommendation was that you should download and run DB SAT to test your security in your DB.

Social Listening

Colin Oliver – Digital Sales Programme Manager

Colin introduced the concept of Social Listening: the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online. Oracle provides this service to any customer if you contact them. 

He mentioned that you can take info from forums/blogs/tweets/etc and make sense/meaning out of it.
He created a report using a tool called Sysomos

Autonomous

Ronan Kelehan – Cloud Solutions Specialist.

What are common Data Warehouse challenges? Manual, complex and slow process that have a really slow turnaround.
Introducing Autonomous DB: Fast, Easy and Elastic. Autonomous is based on Exadata + DB 18c + Oracle Cloud.

He then proceeded to show some demos on when that runs faster than on prem:

Note that not all the time performance in the cloud is better than on prem! On those cases Orace will provide help to optimize them. Just raise an SR!

On the transactional side, Autonomous Transactional Processing is great for mission critical apps and/or mixed workloads.

Regarding DBA’s, I liked that he mentioned better work-life balance for them since their job would turn more into a 9-5 business than on-call emergency availability.

On benefits he mentioned 80/90% cost savings by migrating to autonomous.

When to use each case?

What about running costs?

Yes, you can pay a normal license or you can do BYOL, which is what Aer Lingus is trying to do here.

Blockchain

Ian Keane – Head of Sales Consulting for UK & Ireland

Blockchain is a system that:

• Mantains a distributed ledger in a peer-to-peer network
• Allows multiple untrusted parties to do business securely
• Reduces the need for third-party intermediaries
• Enables real-time & unalterable records replicated among participants

Here is a cool video Oracle built about it: