Ranko Mosic

Larry Ellison's publicly proclaimed goal is to make Oracle another IBM. 1960's, Watson's IBM, not Lou Gerster's IBM. It looks like he came close to the goal, i.e., he did create another IBM, unfortunately the latter incarnation (even Oracle market cap today  is actually identical to IBM's). Nothing depicts better what Oracle became than the latest release of Oracle database - 12cR2. Oracle is dead last in the race to SAP Hana defined (as SAP likes to point out ) goal of in-memory, columnar database. Even IBM beat Oracle with actually quite solid IBM BLU Acceleration product released many months ago. What a journey - from little 70's database startup that beat mighty IBM to market using IBM's own invention (relational database), killed other similar competition like Sybase, Informix, Ingres with innovative tactics like identical database port to everything to become n... (more)

Mainstream Business Applications and In-Memory Databases

(Please refer to the following article: Oracle 12c In-Memory, Columnar Database & How It Relates to SAP Hana for update on IMDB/Columnar databases) Contemporary large servers are routinely configured with 2TB of RAM. It is thus possible to fit an entire average size OLTP database in memory directly accessible by CPU. There is a long history of academic research on how to best utilize relatively abundant computer memory. This research is becoming increasingly relevant as databases serving business applications are heading towards memory centric design and implementation. If you si... (more)

Big Data: Enterprise Class Machine Learning with Spark and MLbase

Machine Learning is a critical part of extracting value from Big Data. Choosing proper model, preparing data and getting usable results on large scale data is non-trivial exercise. Typically process consists of model prototyping using higher level, (mostly) single machine based tool like R, Matlab, Weka, then coding in Java or some other language for large scale deployment. This process is fairly involved, error prone, slow and inefficient. Existing tools aiming at automating and improving this process are still somewhat immature and wide scale Machine Learning enterprise adopti... (more)

Towards Next Generation Enterprise IT

Data processing power is likely to continue growing. Are contemporary IT development methods, processes and procurement practices properly positioned to take advantage of increasing capabilities? CPU/Memory/Storage can today be provisioned in a few clicks. Limitations presented by processing power and physical infrastructure will continue to be of less importance, as was the case in the past. We are gradually coming close to a situation where constraints determining present corporate IT standards are not an issue any more. For example, it is current practice that OLTP and analyti... (more)

Oracle Disaster Recovery Site Hosted by Amazon Cloud

DR sites are typically built as an exact replica of the primary site. Application and database software is installed on DR site and sits there mostly unused, waiting for a disaster to happen. DR site is very expensive proposition than only large companies are able to afford. Amazon AWS is an interesting alternative to having your own DR site. Oracle databases on the DR side are in Data Guard configuration with a primary site and actively apply archive log files shipped from there. Pay per use, scalable Amazon Cloud model makes it an attractive alternative to creating and maintai... (more)