Also see related story: Oracle Database 11g - what's hot and what's not
With the release today of the latest iteration of Oracle's flagship database – Oracle Database 11g - Andy Mendelsohn and Bob Shimp are two of the Redwood Shores, Calif. company's most sought after spokespersons. The duo have been living and breathing 11g for the past several months. Mendelsohn as senior vice-president, Oracle Server Technologies has been actively involved in the development of the 11g and its features. Shimp as vice-president of Oracle's Global Technology Business Unit will play a pivotal in bringing the product to market. In this interview held at the Ritz-Carlton café in Boston, the two Oracle executives discuss the key features of Database 11g with IT World Canada's online editor, Joaquim P. Menezes.
What are key focus areas of Oracle Database 11g and what customer needs does the product address?
Bob - The theme of our release this time is innovation. Over the past couple of years, we've found our customers are moving out of the cost-cutting phase and much more into the growth phase of their business.
That trend generates a whole different set of challenges for these companies – starting with data growth. It's a tremendous challenge for many companies that the amount of information in their database is doubling and tripling every few years.
In addition, the quality of service issues that stem from having lots of different applications and projects online are challenging [their] existing infrastructure to adapt rapidly to new business opportunities. To do that they need to be able to maintain the scalability of their systems and to ensure these are reliable and secure, especially when making changes to all these applications.
And change itself is a big challenge because traditionally database systems required a great deal of time to prepare for upgrades and improvements – that's what you find across the industry.
How does Oracle Database 11g help businesses address these challenges?
Bob - 11g has hundreds of features specifically designed to help you:
• Get control over that tremendous data growth – with our partitioning option and compression capabilities, for instance;
• Experience enhanced performance and scalability – and also improve the reliability of the database, through capabilities such as Oracle DataGuard;
• Manage change – 11g includes new technology called real application testing. It dramatically shrinks the amount of time required for you to prepare for an upgrade to your database. While traditionally it can take months to test and prepare for a database upgrade, we can do that now in a matter of days;
Traditionally, DBAs would do simulated testing. We're offering the ability to capture a production workload and use that for your testing purposes.
This is a unique story in the industry, and a very powerful model for dramatically reducing time to upgrade.
Why is there such an emphasis on change-management in Oracle Database 11g, and what's special about real application testing?
Andy - Gartner Group, in a study, talked to IT operations people about their key issues moving forward. The number one issue [they identify] is the pace of change of their systems. IT ops folk need to respond to the business needs by innovating, adding new IT systems, enhancing systems.
The rate of change is very difficult for them to keep up with. Because for every change, the stability of their systems is at risk.
The biggest innovation in 11g – real application testing – responds to this challenge. It is designed to help customers change their systems much more rapidly and still ensure reliability, and lower the whole risk of the change.
How? The key part of this is accomplished through a technology called "workload capture and replay." It helps you avoid the prolonged process of creating regression tests, by allowing you to record the actual production workload on production systems and then carry that over to your test environment and run it there as regression tests.
This can produce tremendous time- and cost-savings. A development cycle for a regression test could take half a year. But by real application testing you could cut that down to a few days – by just capturing and replaying your workload.
We also have a similar feature for just dealing with the SQL aspects of your workload. So you could go into the production system and just capture the SQL statements, also bring them over to the test environment and then test any changes to the optimizer behaviour between [releases]. Say you're moving from the 10g to the 11g release. You could replay the SQL statements, and look at the performance running under both the old and the new versions of the optimizer, and check for any performance regressions.
In the first part you always get better performance. But there may only be one or two of your thousands of statements that may be more regressed. You'll detect that and be able to use the auto-tuning capability of the database to fix it. You can then move to production with the confidence that it's reliable and performing optimally.
That's the big capability in this release that nobody else in the industry has. It really handles this number one concern that customers have: being able to change your systems with the confidence that they are going to work reliably and stably.
In your view, how widely will this feature be used among your customers?
Andy – We've had beta customers look at the feature, and we've talked to them. From what I can see, every single customer will end up using this feature. It's one of those issues that every customer experiences. Every customer has to do a regression test for their production environment.
Bob – This capability can radically shorten the time to bring a new application on line. And for businesses it's a competitive advantage if they can shrink the amount of time it takes to bring that project online by (say) a few months.
Andy - In the presentation we're doing [at the launch of 11g], we give some estimates for how long it takes to design a regression test for a production system. It could easily be six months. This is not an unusual development cycle – going through the spec process, designing the test, and finally deploying that. With real application testing, you avoid that whole process.
Isn't it conceivable that you may want to do selective captures? You may not need to record your entire production workload and move that over to your test environment, but just certain aspects.
Andy - Yes. You may say the interesting part of my production workload is between 10 am and noon on a business day. So I may just capture that workload and bring that over. Or you may also say that from midnight to 2 a.m. I run my batch reporting jobs and I'd like to capture that too. So that too can be captured and brought over to the test environment. That's how you could capture a significant subset of what people are doing.
It seems that performance management is another big area of focus within 11g. Could you talk about some of the capabilities here – such as the automation of SQL tuning?
Andy - In terms of SQL tuning - one of the features we offer in 11g is an extension of a capability within 10g, where