Category Archives: Cloud

A new North Star has risen


While this post is not going to be about pulsars, black holes or any other form of astrological phenomenon…It still is going to cover one of the most exciting and fundamental shifts in the IT industry today.

A tale of two convergences

This tale is discussing convergence.
To understand the significance of any convergence, it is necessary to understand the lines that are coming together. Please indulge me when I review these.
The challenging bit is the fact that inside both of the lines there are only the very early glimpses of this new era. They are still very much busy with the day-to-day operations in open source or conquering more of their base realm.

Why Postgres is the answer

I migrated myself from Oracle to Postgres! Moving from a steady path as an Oracle ACE to this—at least for me at that time—brand new world of open source data management. If you want to know how and what, I wrote a trilogy about that here, here and here.
After working in the Oracle realm for almost a quarter of a century, moving from Oracle to Postgres truly felt like following a new North Star. It has proven to provide good guidance.
With the phrase still in my head—”horses for courses”—the PostgreSQL Global Development Group does focus exclusively on Postgres. Coming from Oracle, though, it made me wonder who focuses on all the other aspects that vendors create to make their systems work. This “emergence from the red bubble” made me realize that there are much broader challenges, which leads to the “second thread” for convergence, in this story.

I like to think this puts me in a position that allows me to oversee this part of the spectrum (databases and data management) to a certain degree.

Note: if you realize where the data management industry is moving, Postgres is the answer.
Hold that thought!

Brain-breaking challenges

Over the years, much focus has been on infrastructure. Simply because it is expensive, tedious, error-prone and has lots and lots of room for improvement.

  • Infrastructure as code – your server is not your pet, you do not tend to it, you replace it.
  • Cloud infrastructure – your server?? It is not your server… you just use it, you are server-less.
  • Many more of these developments have shaken the world since I started in IT.

There are a number of drivers that we can distinguish and that play a part here:

  • Cost needs to go down!! The ever emerging CIO challenge is: do more with less. And, we are succeeding in that, year after year…
  • Speed needs to go up!! We need more features for our applications, we need them sooner, we need them working more flawlessly.

Working in IT operations during various points in time, these elements have always given me the hardest brain-breaking challenges.

The winner is…Postgres

It is really, and undeniably so (or at least it is so in my book), Postgres has won, and where it is still competing, it will win <full stop>

Why?

There are several reasons why I think—why I know—this is going to happen.

  1. Publicly governed open source, community driven open source, give it a name. It is not a for-profit thing that is behind the technology…Hence, there are no barriers or boundaries to opportunities and direction.
  2. Relational will never die. Dr. Michael Stonebraker said it himself, there is going to be no post-relational era, and the more data management / processing methodologies we get, the more we will need SQL to make sense of things.
  3. Metcalfe and Reed’s laws. More ideas, more contributors, more firepower to Postgres. Postgres’ strong and unwavering foundation grows and evolves. The foundations laid by the PostgreSQL core team will continue to feed the fire of Postgres for the foreseeable future.
  4. Datawarehouse, Datalakehouse, Graph, NoSQL, NewSQL, distributed, and what other mumbo-magic words you can put together. We’ve seen it in the past and we will see it again…it will all converge back to Postgres. It’s inevitable. The latest  evidence: Apache AGE. I rest my case.

Stop for a minute… just a brief pause to think about some of the implications of this…Put prejudice aside, and just consider this: the Power of Postgres, the most transformative tech since Linux.

Kubernetes (K8s)

Enter Kubernetes! If you have not yet done so, I strongly recommend watching the two-part documentary on the origins of K8s here and here.

Once upon a time, at a conference somewhere in Eastern Europe, a keynote speaker was talking about IT operations. At some point in the story, he told us that he was on the phone with his CEO after a failed deployment. He said; “Look, Sir, the application worked on my computer!” and his CEO replied: “Well, that’s all good, except that I am not paying you to make it work on your computer, but I pay you to make it work on my computer”.
In my opinion, this is one of the key elements that container infrastructure solves. Immutable infrastructure, as part of running Postgres, the Kubernetes way. A critical new way of looking at integrating Postgres as a core element for data processing in a true cloud native manner.

Apart from doing infrastructure very well, K8s turns the world of application development on its head. Monolithic Applications become Microservices based solutions, the paradigm that allows for things such as Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery, and many more of the super-cool things that DORA describes.

Oh, and did I mention that Kubernetes is also a publicly governed open source community driven project?! Check out what the CNCF is all about! I won’t go on about Seven of Nine this time, I promise.

Data on Kubernetes

So basically, there you have it!

We have seen AMAZING things from Postgres!
But they never really focussed on deployment and alike; “horses for courses”.

We have seen AMAZING things from Kubernetes!
But they never really focussed on data and alike because developers need to build features!

Under the awe-inspiring guidance of the CNCF, we have an actual Data on Kubernetes Community!
A first, profound and fundamental step on the path of convergence, where Postgres meets Kubernetes and we start enabling a new era that might start bringing a couple of answers to some age-old (well, as far back as the invention of computers, really) and some newer challenges such as:

From here it is basically: “Hi-ho, Silver! Away!”
There is no stopping this, or as a colleague once paraphrased Babylon 5: “The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”

This is the new North Star.

In the end, we’re just getting started

  1. Oracle to Postgres—well, that’s done. What has not yet been migrated will probably die out at some point.
  2. Postgres is established, no debate there.
  3. Kubernetes is so strong, so appealing, it answers so many questions that it will be with us for quite some time.

There is, though, this one fundamental gap. However you twist or turn it, the user of your app needs data, otherwise what’s the use of all of your mega cool features?

Postgres and Kubernetes, the two most powerful technologies of today answer that question.


Open Source? We have been here before… right!

Since over half a year I have made an adjustment in my course… nothing too dramatic, but still it has had some impact.

I have chosen the path of the more pure technique again. Not in a sense that I don’t manage anymore, though I don’t, but that’s more of a side effect
I have chosen the path of the more pure technique in a sense that the change from Closed Source software to Open Source software allows you to actually work with and solve things by creating solutions rather than trying to figure out how something, someone created for some issue, can reconfigured so it resembles a solution for your actual problem.

Okay… okay… this of course is exaggerated, but it serves to help think about the issue.

No one ever got fired for buying Oracle” is one of the phrases I have heard numerous times over the past period.
Well, no… but it’s also no free pass to –sorry for the phrase– waste money on technology you either never going to use.

Over 80% of the installed base uses less than
20% of the technology they are paying for!

I have followed a number of the brightest mind in the industry (our industry, the database industry) for many years investing vast amounts of time in reverse-engineering pieces of technology that have been built, in order to explain certain behavior.
Of course, very necessary, no argument there, but wouldn’t it be so much more cool if this overwhelming amount of brain-power could be used to actually create stuff??

Open Source in stead of Closed Source…
The answer, I think!

Sure, I am raised with vendor created solutions, that was the default MO when I got trained. VMS, MS-DOS, HP-UX… (are you _that_ old, yes, I am _that_ old) and a number of applications that did the work.
Well, those days are gone… operating systems in data centers have (nearly) all been replaced by Linux distribution installs. And I mean like, as good as all of them.

Sufficiently stable, cost effective and they get the job done.

Next wave?
Databases!

With the current explosive growth of Open Source databases, brace yourselves. Or rather, embrace!

All the exact same arguments that are there for Operating Systems apply. There is no difference, and you, the industry, chose! And you will choose this again. Simply because “it is good enough”, it is much more cost effective and it gets the job done.
The extensibility, the agility of Open Source database software gives you the ability to let your database, be it OLTP, OLAP, Big Data, Polyglot, or whatever we come up with, do what needs to be done.
The current leader of the Open Source relational database systems is PostgreSQL. A platform developed in over 30 years to become an absolutely stable data processing engine for a fraction of the costs of the Closed Source players in this market.

Conclusion:

  1. We have seen wave 1 of Open Source where we all choose to replace the operating system standard with Linux.
  2. We will now see wave 2 of Open Source where we will choose to replace the database management system standard with… PostgreSQL (or in specific cases one of the other, more specialized systems, depending on the need).
Hope this helps!

#Oracle cutting in inspiration and new business?

Over the many years Oracle has been leading the database world, I guess they are now taking something of a wrong turn.
Let me briefly fill you in on my thoughts.

Basically I see two “minor” shifts that are significantly indicative of this:

  1. Oracle Standard Edition 2
  2. Oracle ACE Program

Okay, so you might think I am crazy, but let me try to explain.

Oracle Standard Edition 2

Sometime last year, the long expected, anticipated…, dreaded perhaps even, change to the Oracle database licensing strategy was there.

Oracle Standard Edition (SE) and Oracle Standard Edition One (SE1) licenses were addressed.
There was A LOT of debate on this, I mean, A LOT. Discussions which ran all the way back to HQ, and were driven by passionate people inside and outside of Oracle, inside and outside of the Oracle community… To no avail.

It had been very clear for quite a long time that the SE / SE1 strategy was nothing short of unsustainable inside the Oracle licensing realm. Even though, Oracle SE and SE1 enabled many projects and customers to adopt the phenomenal Oracle technology for their projects. It has some limitations, but with smart thinking and smart planning, a lot of projects could be run with Oracle SE(1). “I am such a good DBA, I can even do it with Oracle Standard Edition!”
Alas, we now have Oracle Standard Edition 2 (SE2) with a new and upgraded price of US 17k (!!) making this solution rather out of the question for many of the projects meant in the above. Please note that SE1 already was a significant investment for some of the projects I have learned to know over the years in regions as the Baltics and Africa.
Yes, of course, I know you can do all of this “In the cloud”. But with the limitation that there are hardly any CSPs (Cloud Service Providers 😉 that enable you to make use of the “cheaper” Oracle license. If you want to leverage your local cloud vendor (mind my word-choice here) it’s BYOL (Bring Your Own License) and, voila, you’re done in for anyway.

Hence, the first significant “shift” in Oracle’s span of attention for new business, creativity and growth…

Oracle ACE Program

More recently there was also a change in the Oracle ACE Program. Which has also led to much debate. But… that bit of the change I am not referring too, I am referring to the bit that does not affect me directly…

Oracle has a small number of very highly appreciated and “industry leading” community advocates called “Oracle ACE Directors”. These people not only have a deep knowledge of everything that is happening in this corner “of the industry”, but are also very passionate about sharing this knowledge. Sharing with Oracle Users, sharing with stakeholders within the Oracle organization, basically, with everyone with a hunger for knowledge around the technology.

For this, these Directors had a few privileges. When the invested their time and their energy in traveling this globe to share, Oracle would support them in some of their travel expenses. This always had the air of “wow, they are paid”. Believe me, it was bare minimal support, just a flying ticket and a hotel-bed to a previously approved conference, when they actually were accepted to do a talk. Nothing shiny, nothing business-classy…

Until now. With the changes to the system, also these modest privileges for the Directors have seized to be.

There was my second significant “shift” in Oracle’s span of attention for new business, creativity and growth…

It has me worried… I should not worry, as it does not affect my day-to-day business… yet.

Albeit we have this cool tech, with PL/SQL, with APEX, with all the features, options and what not, to create solutions that could really better the word (I also firmly believe this).

Oracle is just closing this door, and my toes were still in the doorway, so that hurts.

This was my rant, hope it helps.

#DOAG2016, definitely a crazy week.

#DOAG2016, the largest Oracle Community gathering in Europe. Taking place in Nuremberg, at the Nuremberg Convention Center NCC, one of the more impressive places to hold such a conference, towering 4 stories high, with a big central atrium!!
It is a huge effort to get all of this together!

In this blog-post I want to highlight some of the crazy things I experienced this week… And… I did try to follow my own schedule, but I wasn’t overly successful.

Young talent

One of the things that was somehow quite clear this week, is that we have a lot of young talent out there, eager to learn and share experiences. It is not just the #NextGen “movement” of DOAG, of which Carolin Hagemann made me aware, but just young people on the conference itself.

Discussing “Young PL/SQL” at the unconference session made us all aware that our part of the IT trade is no very sexy and popular with the youngsters. This all despite what was mentioned above. In universities we train SQL, but we don’t train to create real-life business applications, leveraging the power of the one language that keeps SQL close to the data it feasts on, PL/SQL. But, more on that below (Thick Database Paradigm).
To promote PL/SQL, basically two ground requirements were defined:

  1. Create a free ‘PDB as a Service’ for schools;
  2. Inspire teachers to talk about data centric computing

By finding somebody to be regionally or globally owner of this quest, it should be possible to get young professionals as familiar using PL/SQL for creating performant and business-ready applications as they were familiar using Microsoft Excel to do their accounting “back in the days”

ACE program

“There is a disturbance in the force!”

For everybody not acquainted with the Oracle ACE Program by the Oracle Technology Network… You should be!! Please read up, as it is an incredible cool initiative.

The disturbance, you ask?
Well, to retain your “status”, Oracle expects you to do “stuff” and this “stuff” is then evaluated on a yearly basis. Basically the initiative, the disturbance, is to get some transparency in “the stuff”. And, as always, everybody wants change, but few actually are good at “change”. There are rimples and things that change, but in the end; everything will be fine, unless, obviously, when it will not be fine.

Talks

I was honored to (co)host to talks at #DOAG2016:

Bad Boys of Replication – Changing everything…
With Oracle ACED and good friend Björn Rost, about an intense migration project we did some time ago. We were even offered to host our talk in Tokio, the biggest hall at DOAG!

Saving lives at sea at an industrial scale using Oracle Cloud Technology
An insightful (at least I like to think so) talk with my colleague Oliver Limberg. The talk is about the rapid development of a global portal for the maritime logistics branch.

I had a blast, and I hope you did too!

Community spirit

Oracle User Group conferences are about sharing and are about fun. Mr. Martin Widlake wrote a good post about that.

Apart from all the “more formal” things that happened, there were quite a few extracurricular activities, mostly involving an Irish Pub or a restaurant.

This all may sound quite funny and exciting, and, yes, it is alto talk with your co-workers: “Oh, hey, you are going to have fun and party all week!” Of course it is not a drag and a bore, but it has very profound function!
Whenever you run into trouble, these are the exact same people that are not only able, but probably also inclined to help you out, as you would help them out, as friends do among each other. In the end, they, you, your boss and your clients benefit. This is not to be underestimated too much.

The extra, special bit, that DOAG offers are the so called “unconference sessions”.
Not scheduled, no slides, nothing official, just getting together and discussing subjects of interest. Our “Young PL/SQL” was one of these “unconference session”, which turned out to be a great (and valuable) success!

Meeting people

Just to name a few, heroes of long and of yet to come for #DOAG2016:

Dietmar Neugebauer
Frank Dernoncourt
Joel Kallman
Johannes Ahrends
Kamil Stawiarski
Laurent Leturgez
Maja Veselica
Marcel Hofstetter
Piet de Visser
Sabine Heimsath
Stefan Kinnen
Stew Ashton
Uwe Hesse
Zoran Pavlovic
And alle the ones I forget to mention here!!

Thick Database Paradigm

Noting new in IT…

Well, no.

The Thick Database Paradigm (opposed to the “No PL/SQL Paradigm”) is nothing new. We have actually all been doing this since the eighties. Program your business rules, your constraints, everything that makes sure that your data is all that you want it to be, close to that data.
There are so many reasons that speak in favor of this approach that it is nearly overwhelming and deserves at least a book in itself. But, let me make a small attempt to highlighting a few here:

  • spare yourself network bandwidth, by not sending data all over your network to be processed
  • safeguard your data inside the (Oracle) database, so it can be protected by all that has been invented to do so
  • Transact data where it lives and combine and aggregate it there, you will be amazed by the efficiency
  • Remind yourself why you used to think “business logic in middle teer” was a good idea

If you leave possibile religious believes aside, there is no other conclusion possible then that the reinvention of “Thick Database” is the (re)discovery of 2016, right from the time when IT still made sense.

Yes, there are cases where an “Enterprise Service Bus” makes sense, but, as with every technology withing IT, it has a very specific area where it actually adds value or even makes sense. At best, a lot less than all the places where it is used currently!
Not to get carried away in this joyful blog-post, I will leave this topic at this.

The end

I hope to see you at the next Oracle User Group conference, somewhere… Please watch for the asterisk at his page for the conferences that I will attend.

Visiting User Experience Event 18|3|2014

Today I had the privilege to visit the Oracle UX team from the USA. This special event was hosted by Amis Services (@AMIS_Services) and my visit was with Michel Koolwaaij, my esteemed colleague from VIR e-Care Solutions.

The event was super-well attended by a lot of enthusiastic people, comprised of students, novel developers and experienced seniors alike. I also got to meet a whole bunch of super interesting people (again) like:

  • Ultan Ó Broin (@ultan)
  • Patrick Barel (@patch72)
  • Noel Portugal (@noelportugal)
  • Lucas Jellema (@lucasjellema)
  • Lonneke Dikmans (@lonnekedikmans)
  • Mark Vilrokx (@mvilrokx)
  • Aylin Uysal

Through this post I would like to share some of what I picked up from the presentations and demos I went to and key learning points I figured out for myself.

Demo of Oracle voice (by Mark Vilrokx)
Oracle voice is a solutions based on Siri powered by Nuance which in fact now comprises a super lightweight front-end interface for voice-controlling Oracle Fusion Apps. The actual voice recognition and lexicon integration is done on the Nuance back-end.
A personal fun thing to find out is that actually the technology is again based on the work of the Belgian speech-specialists of Lernout & Hauspie, which I got to meet over 10 years ago!

Demo of Oracle mobilitics
Basically this is a demonstration of one of my key-take-aways for today.
These days you, as a classical developer, are challenged to step back, forget “grabbing data and throwing it into a grid or master-detail” and think about how you would “interact” with the data you have in your system.
If you think about it, you would not really want to scroll through master-detail… You want to visualize your data, so it becomes something more tangible and give you an overview with the ability to drill down or zoom in.
The “Designing for Mobility & Simplicity” talk of Aylin Uysal dove deeper into this.

Presentation UX directions with HTML5 by Mark Vilrokx
For me this was somewhat of a confirmation, strangely enough. Basically HTML5 is used as a rapid application development framework for Oracle ADF applications. In effect meaning that an Oracle APEX development environment supersedes Oracle ADF in both speed and diversity of application development (J) End of sentence

Presentation Designing for simplicity by Aylin Uysal
Stressing that person to person collaboration is still super important also (and perhaps even especially) for UX design. Organize several sesison consisting of different stakeholder groups, since UI design differs by user (or stakeholder) category.
Information abundance in classical UIs is to be replaced by minimal data UI design. Having less data, better (more visually represented) strongly increases UX!

Presentation Wireframing 101 by Ultan Ó Broin
Wireframing, in this context was new to me. Create a low fidelity “sketch” of what you want, don’t prototype anything yet! Create difference wireframes of applications and application flows to prevent “Squeak and poop” behavior of management or customers when presenting UX designs in wireframe format. A wireframe is no nicely worked out app, making it difficult to judge for outsiders.
A nice example of such rapid prototyping is the way Google Glasses is developed.
A good tool for digital wireframing (but also just for that) is Balsamiq which is used by the Oracle UX team as the preferred wireframing tool.

Presentation One picture worth a thousand words by Lucas Jellema
In this presentation of more pictures that words, Lucas gave some very cool examples of how pictures are able to, indeed, transfer much more information that words. An inspiration to use when you are UX-ing.

Visit to the Chamber of Secrets
I am so sorry, I had to sign quite an NDA before being let in… Please visit your local Oracle UX-session!

So, what are the key learning points:

  • Step back, and think free-flow how you would consume information. Unthink current UI design and… step back!
  • Less is more, also in UI design. A user experience is about getting to what the NEED as quickly as possible.
  • APEX is a viable development tool, in any situation!
  • User Interface design is becoming a serious trade, a trade to take into account.
  • Watch out for those InfoTiles!

A special “Thank you” to Wieteke Gaykema from AMIS who worked like crazy and still got me in at the Chamer of Secerts, even though I was shamefully late with my NDA!

Cloud Database Offers On-premise Advantages

These are times when there are technologies abundantly available to help you make the very best of the data you gather from your business processes.

Increasing numbers of businesses choose the option to host their production database environment in one of the many cloud forms that are available these days. This example of a smart alternative discusses an additional service you could implement or request when you are dealing with cloud based databases.

In many organizations there is a BI-team responsible for the development of company specific KPIs or compose competitively strategic information based on the information that is gathered during day-to-day business. There often are key management positions that have a need for ad hoc queries to live data. In recent years the grave importance of this intelligence has been recognized as being of the greatest importance for decision support, and giving your organization the biggest competitive advantage possible.

Developing or even running these activities on live data gives the sharpest edge. Doing this on a production environment, nevertheless, is out of the question. Uninterrupted availability and maximum responsiveness for regular activities of these databases are unquestionably important. How can you combine these factors with the proposition of running your database in the cloud while staying smart?

The smart alternatives of Dbvisit enable you to do just this! By leveraging Dbvisit Replicate in a hosted environment you can create one or many local copies of live production data with specific local database settings to do precisely what you need, be it running or developing heavy BI queries or having departmental management looking at or analyzing data as it is recorded. Having (a subset of) the live data uni-directionally delivered from the cloud to your local (desktop) database creates a safe environment to analyze and enable knowledge workers to do the their job without any holds barred!