Wed - Ari Kaplan IOUG for OOW
At 8:30am Chuck Rozwat gave his keynote. It started with a “Safe Harbor” statement to humorously show the level of legalities Oracle (or any public company) has to comply with lately. He introduced Tom Mendoza, President of NetApp. Oracle is 28 years old, and led the industry with Intel and Microsoft. NetApp is in the storage paradigm, with $1.6 billion in revenue. The three main storage players are NetApp, EMC, and Hitachi. The 90’s was “do more with more” – get your project out the door and don’t look back. After 2000 it was “do more with less” based on changing economic times. So what does NetApp do? Well, an office may have 10 storage devices from vendor A that are 50% full and 1 storage device from vendor B that is 100% full. If you need to increase storage for server B you need to buy more storage from vendor B. NetApp allows you to share storage across vendors. Their three business benefits are: consolidate your information, share your information, secure your information.
NetApp duplicated the success factors that Cisco did: 1) don’t base infrastructure on one protocol. They can share Unix and Windows systems to share storage. 2) don’t make hardware – they outsource their manufacturing and pass the savings along to the customers. So they are a software-centric company.
30% of their business is tying with the database. Oracle is their biggest customer. NetApp bought Spinnaker about 2 years ago. 50% of leaks of data is from behind the firewall (inside jobs).
Chuck Rozwat came back out to talk about Oracle’s Fusion initiatives. In the past three technologies have been part of fusions: Applications (Service-Oriented Architecture), Information (Enterprise Information Architecture), Infrastructure (Grip Computing Architecture). These three combine to the Oracle Fusion Architecture.
This week Oracle is announcing Oracle Application Server Release 3. Some new features:
- Java Server Faces - rich web-based standard user interfaces
- EJB 3.0 and J2EE 1.4 – sophisticated business applications
- Enterprise Service Bus
- Enterprise Identity Management – provisioning, federation, identity management
Thomas Kurian came onstage. He showed Oracle JDeveloper 10g and the new modeling capabilities. Excitingly, Oracle made a contest – Brian Emmet, Sr. Software Developer from Stryker Endoscopy, won a TRIP INTO SPACE! It will be in 2008-2009 and have 10 minutes of weightlessness. Then Thomas went on to show the Enterprise Service Bus. What’s new in security? Oracle offers 2 new capabilities with 10g: first is identity management – credentials and permissions . virtual directory, federation to share information across companies, and so on. The 2nd part is securing the information among the services themselves. Oracle Web Services Manager is a new product (10g release 3) to non-intrusively apply operational policies. Thomas showed a demo of this. You can set policies and introduce it into whichever step in the execution you want – it secures the services without actually changing the services themselves. For monitoring and managing, BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) allows you to monitor business events and processes in real-time. New Enterprise Manager features in 10g release 3 include topology-based monitoring, automatic patching, service-level monitoring, tracing. Thomas demonstrated the Oracle BPEL Monitor software.
What are the products in Fusion Middleware? Collaborative Enterprise Portal, Development Tools, Composition and Process Orchestration, Information Aggregation & Analysis, Management, Enterprise Application Server, Security, Grid Computing.
Andy Mendelsohn then came out (whom I wrote about our discussion yesterday). What’s new with 10g release 2? Transaction Processing – on a cluster RAC has world-record on clusters. 13,284 QphH for TPC-H 300GB. Nearest competitor was IBM with only half the number. 10g R2 is 59% faster over 10g R1 with the same hardware. They rewrote the basic sorting and aggregate algorithms in the database to get this result. The example they showed was just on sorting it was 5 times faster from 9i to 10g R2. New security: authentication and authorization, encryption, auditing. He showed “transparent data encryption” which is new in 10gR2 with a demo of protecting credit card information. The first SELECT showed credit card numbers in clear text. The next SELECT showed a non-authorized user but they did not have access to the table. The next was a hacker editing the file and could see the information. With the new Oracle security, you can see the data with the SELECT but it is stored encrypted in the file so the hacker can’t read it.
What is coming from Oracle with regards to security? “Project Data Vault” lets you create a “realm” which is a collection of schemas. It solves a problem around consolidation of multiple databases into one database. “Project Audit Vault” stores audit data which can be aggregated and reviewed for compliancy.
Then he showed how easy it is to get RAC up and running.
Next Kevin Kettler, CTO of Dell came out. Dell and Oracle worked on “Project Mega Grid” which is a large RAC system based in Oracle’s Austin Data Center. It’s a 100-node cluster, managed with OEM.
Andy Mendelsohn came out again to demo Project Raptor. This is what we talked about yesterday, and today he demonstrated it for the keynote audience. Raptor is client-based (not web-based). HTML DB release 2 came out last week. It’s for creating a simple application and deploying it to the web in a matter of minutes. You do not need to know SQL – you just drag-and-drop from a query builder. And you can pick out “themes” for styles.
I was unable to attend Larry Ellison’s keynote, but heard about it from those that did. Security was a key priority of Oracle. Other priorities of Oracle include automation, open standards, business intelligence.
Some Q & A with the audience:
Q: What will you acquire next?
A: Want to get me in jail?
Q: Will you guarantee if there is a security hole Oracle will fix in 3 months?
A: No, next question (he then explained that no one can make such a promise).
Tonight was the big bash at the Pier. It was the largest such event ever at an Oracle conference. Three tents and a stadium, with lots of food (Chinese woks, carved meats, buffalo wings, desserts, etc) and drinks (wine, beer, sodas, water). There were 3 stages for bands, which included Counting Crows (“Mr Jones and Me”, “Right Here”), Bow Wow Wow (“I Want Candy”), Berlin (“Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun), Stung (Sting cover band), and karaoke. Great fireworks – two sets – one traditional and one labeled “dancing Chinese fireworks”. Busses were easy to get on/off and pretty quick (not much waiting).Safra Katz (Oracle CFO) and Tom Mendoza of NetApp addressed the crowd and introduced Counting Crows.