by Robert Buda | Aug 18, 2014 | Oracle DBA
Upgrades and patches are a primary cause of planned downtime for Oracle databases and the applications that rely on them. Therefore, you need to have a strategy and process for your Oracle database upgrades that minimizes business disruption but does not postpone these essential tasks.
Waiting to perform upgrades is likely to increase costs and downtime. Failure to apply patches in a timely manner not only can take longer and make things more complicated when you finally do it, but also can leave your databases open to instability and security risks.
Keeping your Oracle environment up-to-date with minimal impact on the business depends on timely periodic maintenance that includes incremental updates and critical patch upgrades. The cadence of these activities should be tailored to your specific business needs.
But with more and more data to manage and skilled Oracle DBAs in short supply, many organizations are hard-pressed to keep up with these kinds of day-to-day database maintenance tasks. It can likewise be a challenge for DBAs to keep their knowledge up-to-date so they’re aware of best practices and “gotchas” associated with patches and upgrades.
If your team struggles to keep up with patches and upgrades, or the business is experiencing excessive planned downtime, you should consider outsourcing these “non-core” processes. Here are three reasons why:
- Lower database administration costs
Hiring the expertise you need, when you need it, often costs less than hiring, paying and training full-time Oracle DBAs.
- Improved business agility
Offloading “non-core” processes like database patching and upgrades can help supplement the efforts of in-house Oracle DBAs, enabling them to focus on data modeling, database design and other strategic objectives that drive innovation and get new applications to market.
- Reduced planned downtime and improved SLAs
Outsourcing Oracle DB patching and upgrades to experts who do them every day of the week will result in more process automation, more proactive problem-solving, and more best practices to ensure quality and minimize downtime. That means improved SLAs around uptime, performance and reliability. It can also mean reduced negative impact on business revenue and customer satisfaction.
Oracle patching and upgrades can be performed onsite or remotely with equal speed and efficiency. Activities can take place at off-peak times, in sync with other planned downtime activities, or whenever it best suits your operations.
In addition, outsourced Oracle DBA experts will have solid experience with “tips and tricks” like using Oracle Data Guard and Oracle GoldenGate to minimize downtime and optimize results. Expertise like this can be critical for organizations that need to upgrade mission-critical database environments that are currently running older Oracle versions.
If you have a one-time, periodic or ongoing need for additional support to patch and/or upgrade your Oracle environment, contact Buda Consulting for a free consultation to discuss your options.
by Robert Buda | Aug 5, 2014 | Database Architecture, Oracle DBA
Many organizations have limited their Oracle DBA outsourcing to tactical/operational functions like monitoring, backup and patching. But the changing technology landscape is transforming the DBA role and requiring greater expertise.
Today’s enterprise data stores are increasingly massive and architecturally complex. They must support e-commerce and other critical applications that are web-based and demand continuous availability, on-demand scalability, robust security, maximum performance and mobile device support. Further, more and more of the data that drives these complex, critical applications reside in the cloud.
To meet these new demands, organizations of all sizes increasingly need strategic Oracle DBA capabilities in addition to tactical DBA roles. But it can be hard to hire and retain expert Oracle DBAs with these skills, especially when IT budgets are constrained and the skills are in short supply.
In this increasingly common scenario, outsourcing expert Oracle DBA skills to a trusted, onshore partner can be a lifesaver. Not only can you potentially save money, but also you can improve the availability, security and business value of your most valuable asset—your data. This can give you an edge in the marketplace by improving decision-making, shortening time-to-market for new applications and delivering better performance and service to customers.
What strategic Oracle DBA services should you consider outsourcing? Start with the capabilities that are the most in demand, the hardest to cultivate in-house and offer the greatest benefit. These three will top the list for many organizations:
One: Data integration
Big data and analytics are all about integrating multiple data sources to streamline access while reducing management and storage complexity. At many companies data is siloed, making it difficult to get a comprehensive view of the business. When competitors are successfully leveraging more accurate and comprehensive intelligence, can your business afford not to take these steps? Hiring an expert Oracle DBA consultant can reduce cost, risk and time-to-value.
Two: Database architecture and design
Virtualization, cloud services and clustering offer new ways to derive greater value from existing infrastructure investments. An expert Oracle DBA can help you design and implement a massively scalable and available database system that meets the dynamic needs of a global business. The ability to understand, articulate and address the requirements of both the business and its customers is key to this strategic role.
Three: Cloud services
Setting up, managing and scaling an Oracle RDBMS in the cloud takes more than basic capacity planning and administration. It requires a database that has been properly architected and performance tuned to deal with cloud’s challenges—especially security and compliance. This is perhaps more obvious in regulated industries where compliance concerns are paramount, but many businesses moving data to the cloud face comparable concerns.
There’s a lot of buzz these days about making your business “data driven.” Highly experienced senior database professionals will be key to moving in that direction, and they’re in increasingly short supply. Contact Buda Consulting to discuss your Oracle DBA strategy and needs.
by Robert Buda | Jul 28, 2014 | Oracle DBA
Does your organization have key Oracle DBA skills that can help you to derive value from big data? And what is “big data” anyhow? Does it just relate to big (like petabyte-sized) databases? Or is there more to it?
Besides being simply “big,” big data has two other key attributes:
- It can also include a heterogeneous mix of structured and unstructured data types, and
- It tends to come at you hard and fast!
The business challenge with big data is to figure out which data elements within the big data “deluge” are of value to you, and how to most effectively capture and analyze those elements. As the volume of available data grows and the number and types of questions the business wants to ask also expands, new “big data administration” skills also come into play.
An expert Oracle DBA can help with harnessing big data by creating efficient ways to make critical data available to business processes. As I see it, three emerging “key skills” are especially useful in this regard: integration, reporting and Hadoop.
One: Integration
Perhaps the most vital “big data DBA” skill set involves integrating data from a wide range of sources. In the case of big data, successful integrations look beyond mechanics to understand what the business needs, what problem(s) it is looking to solve, and why the data has potential value. Effective communication with business stakeholders is key to success in this area. Oracle Big Data Connectors can help by making it easier to acquire and pre-process data with Apache Hadoop and perform integrated analysis within Oracle Database.
Two: Reporting
“Big data DBAs” also face new challenges with reporting and data visualization. Finding the nuggets of gold within the big data rubble pile means developing reports that can be efficiently and effectively analyzed by business stakeholders, often across multiple parameters and with different goals in mind. Points of focus here include creating the appropriate data structures, and maintaining satisfactory performance. Tuning queries for specific reporting functions means going beyond typical DBA activities to deeply understand the business context and match business needs to the different visualization and reporting tools you have available.
Three: Hadoop
Apache Hadoop is an open-source software framework for storing and processing large-scale datasets across clusters of inexpensive servers running in parallel. Hadoop is a robust and highly scalable platform that enables businesses to run applications against petabytes of data. Hadoop also facilitates cost-effective storage and fast, flexible querying of both structured and unstructured data sources. It’s designed to enable companies to store “all” their data for later processing. Big data DBAs are getting into Hadoop in a big way, because there are multiple ways for Oracle shops to leverage Hadoop-based data and integrate it with Oracle Database for maximum benefit.
Of course, each organization will have unique challenges and opportunities when working with big data. Proper project planning and database design will be central to success and rapid time-to-value. Contact Buda Consulting to talk about how we can support your business as it moves to embrace big data.
by Robert Buda | Jun 20, 2014 | Oracle DBA
Profiting from big data means changing how your organization views data. Big data is often unstructured, and wringing value from it demands advanced analytics. Does this mean that conventional Oracle DBAs, with their relational database focus, are irrelevant in this new world order? Or do big data challenges make the Oracle DBA role more vital than ever to business operations?
Personally, I think any claims that Oracle DBAs are diminishing in relevance to today’s enterprise are spurious. How can data experts not be increasingly important when companies are accumulating and storing more and more and more data—and keeping more and more of it “live” and accessible across petabytes of ever-cheaper disk space in both their own data centers and in cloud storage?
An Oracle DBA is not just a data administrator, but also a data management expert. While some have more experience than others with managing unstructured data, most Oracle DBAs have valuable data integration, data quality assurance, database performance troubleshooting and analytics/reporting skills.
Organizations looking to maximize the return on their big data investment need to make the right choices upfront to point them toward success. What big data framework would work best in your environment? What tools can best drive the analytics you need? Oracle DBAs have the “data design” skills firms need help build the foundation for a big data solution.
Beyond that, Oracle DBAs understand how to manage data, and how to translate business requirements into reporting and forecasting capabilities. They also are likely to have a nose for “data exploration”—identifying and capturing key data elements. Indeed, in many organizations Oracle DBAs, both employees and consultants, are the people building the new skills that it will take to harness big data.
At the same time their criticality as a knowledge resource is increasing, Oracle DBAs are becoming more visible within the enterprise. Data is now seen as an opportunity and a source of business value. How can you collect and collate data to support better decision-making and better understand our customers? Ask an Oracle DBA.
So while newer roles like “data scientist” or data analyst might seem hot and hip, the Oracle DBA is far from outmoded. The DBA role is certainly changing to accommodate big data skill sets. But in many companies focusing on big data, the Oracle DBA becoming more important than ever.
Contact Buda Consulting to learn how Oracle DBA outsourcing can help your organization derive more intelligence from its data.
Inspiration for this post came from:
by Robert Buda | Jun 12, 2014 | Oracle DBA
Even in this “age of outsourcing,” Oracle database administration (DBA) outsourcing is still often overlooked. Despite some predictions to the contrary the overall percentage of organizations outsourcing their DBA has remained relatively small and stable in recent years.
Perhaps this is because Oracle DBA outsourcing is most often treated as a cost-based, tactical decision rather than a strategic move. But with the right partner, the benefits of outsourcing your Oracle DBA can extend well beyond bottom-line cost savings on database management and support. These include:
- Improved database performance and availability
- Enhanced data security
- Continuous support for 24×7 web environments
- Increased developer productivity and efficiency
- Reduced attrition and loss of organizational knowledge
“But wait!” I hear you saying. “Aren’t those the very reasons why I have a full-time Oracle DBA on staff?” “And don’t I need this expertise more than ever to keep up with disruptive trends like mobility, cloud and big data that are turning my data stores inside out?”
I’m not talking about eliminating your Oracle DBA expertise—I’m talking about enhancing and stabilizing it, by partnering with a certified DBA expert that offers unbeatably broad and deep expertise and won’t leave for a better paying job. I’m also talking about leveraging expertise not only in the realm of process-related, everyday database services; but also project-oriented, cutting-edge architecture, intelligence and security/compliance work.
One: Improved database availability
According to Oracle, human error is the second leading cause of unplanned downtime after network outages. By hiring the services of bona fide experts you can improve database availability and reduce the cost of downtime associated with hiring junior Oracle DBAs because they’re all you can afford.
Two: Enhanced data security
Like uptime, data security and risk reduction are a function of expertise, not just policies. An outsourced Oracle DBA expert can probably assess your environment and identify vulnerabilities better than an in-house DBA who 1) may not have focused on building security expertise, and 2) is actually hampered by familiarity with your environment. To achieve optimum security and ensure compliance it’s advisable to outsource to an “onshore” partner that you know will comply with strict US privacy laws.
Three: Continuous support for 24×7 environments
If you’re offering your clients a global service that’s up-and-running 24×7, the cost of keeping in-house DBAs online could be overwhelming. Using outsourced Oracle DBAs to keep your core Oracle databases purring along will be cheaper and more predictable.
Four: Increased developer productivity
When you strategically outsource Oracle architecture, design and performance tuning expertise you not only end up with more robust and scalable applications, you also optimize developer time by streamlining the development process with everything from better decisions to better documentation, at least where the database is concerned.
Five: More stable organizational knowledge
With Oracle DBAs in such high demand, the attrition rate is high. By using remote Oracle DBA support on a consistent basis, enterprises actually reduce the risk of losing expertise and confidential information. Likewise, there’s no “ramp-up time” while a new employee comes up to speed.
In short, Oracle DBA outsourcing can deliver the expertise required to enable organizations of all sizes to handle growing database responsibilities—and yes, cut costs as well. Contact Buda Consulting to start a conversation on how we can help.
