Oracle Open World 2011 Highlights

Oracle OpenWorld 2011 was a resounding success with more than 45,000 attendees, including more sponsors and exhibitors than prior years in attendance. Oracle and partner executives focused in their keynotes on the latest technologies for today and the future. International subject matter experts shared their insights in thousands of technical sessions, demos, hands-on labs, and exhibitions.

Park Lane IT was represented at the event by our CEO and ODTUG Vice President, Bambi Price.

Highlights from OpenWorld 2011:

Oracle Fusion Applications currently available are:

• Customer Relationship Management

• Financial Management

• Human Capital Management

• Procurement

• Project Portfolio Management

• Supply Chain Management

• Governance, Risk, and Compliance

According to Oracle, Fusion Apps are available on premise, public cloud, private cloud and a hybrid public/private cloud

Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine

Oracle unveiled the Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine, the industry’s first in-memory hardware and software system engineered to run analytics faster than ever, provide real-time speed-of-thought visual analysis, and enable new types of analytic applications.

Oracle Exalytics enables organizations to make decisions faster in the context of rapidly shifting business conditions while broadening user adoption of business intelligence (BI) though the introduction of interactive visualization capabilities that make every user an analyst.

Organizations will be able to extend their BI initiatives beyond reporting and dashboards to modelling, planning, forecasting, and predictive analytics. Planning applications can be scaled across the enterprise with faster, more accurate planning cycles.

This new system combines Oracle’s Business Intelligence Foundation with enhanced visualization capabilities and performance optimizations, an optimized version of the industry-leading Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database with analytic extensions, and a highly scalable Oracle server designed specifically for in-memory business intelligence.

According to Oracle, Exalytics incorporates an in-memory database, a design principle that will put it in direct competition with SAP’s HANA in-memory computing platform. In-memory databases place information to be processed in RAM, instead of reading it off disks, providing a performance boost.

The Exalytics machine includes 40 processor cores and 1TB of DRAM, but can hold five to 10TB of data in memory thanks to compression, Ellison said.

It runs a software stack that includes parallelized versions of Oracle’s TimesTen in-memory database, BI (business intelligence) stack and Essbase OLAP (online analytical processing) server, Ellison revealed.

The system handles user queries “at the speed of thought” through a new interactive user interface, which will be demonstrated on Monday, Ellison said. The UI runs the same on PCs and the Apple iPad. “It really is quite spectacular.”

An adaptive in-memory cache decides which information should be stored in memory based on the ongoing workload, he said. “If people keep asking the same questions over and over again, we keep the answers in memory so we don’t have to compute them again.” The cache is self-tuning, he added.

Big Data Appliance

This product was on display outside the OpenWorld keynote hall and according to the description card, will involve the Hadoop open-source framework for large-scale data processing as well as NoSQL database from Oracle.

Oracle unveiled the Big Data Appliance, the newest addition to its line of products that combine software and hardware, during the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco yesterday.

“Big data” is an industry buzzword that refers generally to the massive amounts of information generated by websites, sensors and other sources apart from traditional enterprise applications.

The new appliance includes a distribution of the open source Hadoop programming framework, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, a distribution of the R open-source statistical analysis software, and the Oracle NoSQL database.

“There’s a lot of data, and a lot of it has very low business value. There’s only a few nuggets that people want to find,” Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies, told press and analysts. Hadoop and other tools can distill that data down to something useful, and it can then be loaded into a data warehouse, particularly one powered by Oracle’s Exadata appliance, for further analysis, he said.

NoSQL refers to a growing set of database technologies that can be defined by what they omit, such as “SQL, joins, strong analytic alternatives to those, and some forms of database integrity,” analyst Curt Monash said recently. “If you leave all four out, and you have a strong scale-out story, you’re in the NoSQL mainstream.”

Based on Berkeley DB

The Oracle NoSQL database is a “distributed, highly scalable, key-value database” that is “easy to install, configure and manage, supports a broad set of workloads and delivers enterprise-class reliability backed by enterprise-class Oracle support,” according to an Oracle statement.

It is based on Oracle’s Berkeley DB product. “Berkeley DB is probably the most popular key-value store out there on the web,” but it uses a single index, Mendelsohn said. For the NoSQL database, Oracle “turned it from a single index to a distributed implementation, where you could have maybe 100 indexes,” he said.

Mendelsohn said that like Berkeley DB, the NoSQL database will be available in both open-source and commercial versions. The latter will probably gain premium features over time.

Meanwhile, Oracle recognises that administrators and developers may not be familiar with programming models like Hadoop, Mendelsohn said.

“Hadoop as it currently stands is a very niche technology,” according to Mendelson. “Everybody’s talking about it, but who in our enterprise installed base can use something like this?”

That’s why tools like the data-integrator adapter and loader for Hadoop are so important, since they help bridge that skills gap, he said.

“Have we done enough with Hadoop tooling? I don’t think we’re there yet, but we’ve made some good steps,” Mendelsohn added.

Proprietary packages for R distribution

Oracle’s R distribution is integrated with its 11g database, allowing R applications to tap data within those systems, Oracle said. A standard distribution of R will be used, but Oracle also plans to release some proprietary packages for it, Mendelsohn said.

Oracle also plans to offer all of the software products in stand-alone form as well as with the appliance, according to a statement.

Pricing and a release date for the Big Data Appliance weren’t available, although it will compete with products such as Aster Data, Netezza and Greenplum.

Forrester analyst James Kobielus said it’s not Oracle’s first ‘Big Data’ appliance, if big data is defined as “the three Vs,” he said. “Volume (petabytes of stored analytic data), velocity (real-time data capture, transformation, loading, analysis, and query), and variety (handle diverse structured, semi-structured data).”

Massively parallel processing

“Exadata is all of that, and Exadata is already optimised for mixed workloads of in-database analytics and massively parallel processing (MPP) with a rich library of advanced analytics algorithms and models,” he said.

One important consideration is how many of Hadoop’s many sub-projects will be part of Oracle’s distribution, Kobielus said.

MapReduce and Pig are core of Hadoop modeling and development, with Mahout libraries increasingly being adopted for machine learning,” he said. “HDFS and HBase are at the core of Hadoop batch and real-time data storage and management, with some uptake of Cassandra for distributed real-time analytics and transactional computing. If Oracle’s Hadoop appliance doesn’t incorporate most of these, plus Zookeeper and Hadoop Common tools, then it cannot be regarded as a full enterprise-ready Hadoop platform.”

Mendelsohn declined to enumerate every Hadoop component Oracle plans to include in the distribution.

However, “what the people in the Hadoop community expect is going to be there,” he said. “We’re not going to pull out something because it competes with Oracle. It will be a complete distribution.”

It’s likely that Oracle will end up acquiring specialised Hadoop vendors to beef up its array of tools, Kobielus said.

Oracle OEM12c

 This was released during OpenWorld and Park Lane IT have now implemented it at IDP.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is the only cloud management console for Oracle that allows cloud stakeholders to create rich business services consisting of any combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) – including database as a service (DBaaS) and middleware as a service (MWaaS) – and software as a service (SaaS).
• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control provides wizard-driven, role-based capabilities for all stakeholders involved in planning, deploying, managing and consuming an enterprise cloud.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c supports enterprise architects, cloud administrators, application developers and administrators, DBAs, line of business users and governance and finance personnel. Key capabilities include:
• Cloud planning tools: allow architects and cloud administrators to model their cloud environment in order to maximize the utilization of resources. A key capability – the capacity and consolidation planner – allows for easier cloud on-boarding through recommendations and automated workflows.
• Automatic set-up of shared pools and system resources: enables cloud administrators to pool together IT resources and define rules, privileges, and policies that govern how resources are consumed; and helps ensure ease of management and quality of service.
  • Built-in self-service: allows transparent access to cloud resources for line of business users and application developers. Consumers can use the self-service portal to order services from a central catalog, manage and monitor the requested services, and receive chargeback information.
  • Comprehensive metering and chargeback: enables finance personnel, IT managers and service providers to measure usage and charge for services. Several chargeback mechanisms are provided. Pre-built integrations with Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management offer comprehensive billing capabilities.
  • Unique cloud capabilities deliver industry-first advantages through integrations with two key Oracle products:
  • Oracle VM 3.0: enables administrators to automatically plan and provision cloud environments incorporating VMs, resource pools and zones.
  • Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder: helps application developers model and package complex, multi-tier applications for self-service consumption.
  • Unlike competitive solutions, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c encompasses cloud management across physical and virtual environments for x86 as well as SPARC architectures.

Java

Enterprise developers are definitely waiting to see when Java EE 7 will finally ship. The community is definitely waiting to see how some of the cloud support ideas in EE 7 are going to be leveraged.

Other popular topics; HTML5 and JavaFX. JavaFX 2.0, the next release of the platform, was released. Version 2.0 features APIs for using such Java features as generics and multi-threading, as well as hardware-accelerated graphics.

Additionally, Oracle discussed Java SE advancements, implementation of non-Java languages targeting the Java Virtual Machine, modularisation of the platform, and cloud and mobile opportunities.