Oracle Database 10g

Businesses choose Oracle Database more than any other for its performance, reliability and security. Designed for enterprises of all types, Oracle Database offers small and medium businesses fast, simple installation and extensive self-management. For large enterprises, Oracle Database has advanced features such as clustering. Only Oracle runs on every popular platform including UNIX, Windows and Linux.

Get On The Grid
Oracle Database 10g, Oracle's next-generation database, is the industry's first designed for grid computing. Grid computing reduces the cost of IT by clustering servers together to act as a single large computer, dynamically shifting server resources between applications on demand.

Click here to read Oracle magazine's September Cover Story: Oracle Database 10g - Oracle's database increases performance and availability

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For more information about the Oracle Database 10g, please contact us either by telephone on 7122971/2/3, or by email at marketing@stl-horizon.com

Oracle Database 10g
The World's First Self-Managing, Grid-Ready Database Arrives
By Kelli Wiseth

Oracle's new self-managing database increases performance and availability while enabling commercial grid computing.

There are trends. And there are trendsetters. In the early to mid-1990s, Oracle foretold the internet computing paradigm that organizations of every stripe have now woven into the fabric of their businesses. In the process, IT infrastructure has become extremely critical to the enterprise. "Businesses have become more dependent than ever on their IT systems for everything from day-to-day operations to providing service to their customers and clients," says Sushil Kumar, director of product management for Database Manageability at Oracle. "And many new-generation businesses, such as eBay and Amazon, rely completely on their IT infrastructure's being available—if the system goes away, their entire business is in jeopardy."

In short, says Kumar, IT systems have truly become strategic to the enterprise. And that has had a profound impact on the need for availability, scalability, and high performance of IT systems for organizations of all kinds. Downtime, even for much-needed maintenance, is not an option when a global business must run 24/7.

At the same time, says Kumar, there's growing pressure to maintain profitability amid ever-growing competition in a global economy that continues to tighten its belt. The result, is that "organizations must minimize operating expenses across the board—and IT is no exception," says Kumar.

But as IT systems have become more strategic and integral to the core business, they have also become more complex, more difficult to manage, and more costly. Complexity adds to costs across the board, in terms of time, labor, potential failures, and inability to recover from failure effectively. According to Kumar, these are all reasons why "one of the biggest challenges facing most organizations today is managing a strategic part of the business, its IT systems, more effectively than ever—ensuring the highest performance, scalability, and availability—but at a significantly lower cost than before." These are also some of the reasons that commercial grid computing, enabled in part by cost-effective blade servers, is getting so much attention today. For small incremental costs, organizations can gain more processing power to be used by all data centre resources, delivering faster performance and high availability and scaling as needed—but only if the software can effectively take advantage of that architecture.

Clearly, the time is right for software that monitors and manages itself: software that eases management complexity in a cost-effective manner.

Without self-managing software, companies will be held hostage by increasingly complex applications and heterogeneous systems that currently require scores of highly trained administrators. Management costs are only part of the equation: These same companies will be unable to implement increasingly sophisticated applications that might otherwise offer great business benefits.

Fortunately, Oracle Database 10g has been designed to meet these technology challenges head-on. Delivering faster performance and higher availability while reducing management costs, Oracle Database 10g lets data centres for global enterprises as well as enterprises with resources scattered around the globe corral those resources for optimal utility and usher in a new era of available, powerful, and manageable enterprise computing.

Oracle Database 10g is the realization of Oracle's manageability vision, an overarching strategy across the company that began to take shape many years ago. The manageability strategy has two goals—simplify the management of the database itself, by automating much of the monitoring and maintenance, and provide data centres with a broadly focused, rich management tool that will allow them to manage all the components—not just the database—that the data centre must manage, regardless of where the components are (in the data centre, deployed across a grid, scattered worldwide) and what they are (storage, clusters, application servers, and so on). It all starts with a self-managing database.

The Key to Manageability: The Self-Managing Database
"Oracle's long-term vision for manageability is nothing short of complete automation of the tasks associated with managing the Oracle database," says Kumar. For the past three years, a cross-functional team of more than 200 Oracle developers and architects has been involved in creating the infrastructure and tools to support this vision of proactive, automatic management of the database. Automating the daily, routine tasks associated with managing the Oracle database will free IT professionals to put their talents to use in better, more strategic ways for their business. There's little value-add to organizations or data centres in having a highly paid technologist performing basic monitoring tasks. "The database needs to automatically maintain itself—it shouldn't require any administrative intervention, unless absolutely necessary," says Kumar. The more the database can do to maintain itself, the fewer the required interventions and the lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) over the life of the system. "It's important," adds Oracle's Kumar, "to lose the complexity yet retain the flexibility."

Part of the TCO is the cost of highly skilled technical staff members—who aren't always easy to find. Bob Shirley, a lead developer for Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS), which provides a suite of software tools for use in oil and gas exploration, drilling, and production, states: "The availability, worldwide, of highly trained DBAs is a serious concern to us. And the amount of time a DBA has to spend babysitting the database is also a concern." SIS is busy developing "the next-generation database for oil-field services and new applications that will run against that database." So far, Shirley is favorably impressed by the steps taken in Oracle Database 10g to lower maintenance costs and build in more automation. "Oracle is taking big strides in that direction with the first release of Oracle Database 10g," he says.

Many Oracle Database 10g beta customers echo that sentiment. "Losing complexity while getting more-manageable software pieces in place is one of our top goals," says Rob Leaman, head of the Database department in the Business Information Management System division at Deutsche Post IT Solutions GmbH (DPITS), the IT service provider for Deutsche Post World Net, spun off from that company as a separate entity in 2002. Leaman knows a lot about complexity. DPITS—with some 400 projects currently under way—puts the people in place to develop the vast array of custom applications that directly support DPITS' key client, DPWN, which comprises Deutsche Post, DHL, and Postbank. DPWN's core competency is essentially supply chain management logistics, providing mail communication, parcel, express, logistics, and financial services worldwide. The applications DPITS is involved in developing do everything from sorting mail and bar-coding to monitoring movements of container cargo and air freight; the running of the applications is outsourced to service provider T-Systems International.

However, says Leaman, "we don't just 'fire and forget' the applications." Because DPITS doesn't run the applications in-house, it's especially important that the database be easy to manage: If T-Systems has a problem with an application that it can't solve within a certain time frame, DPITS is the next level of support. With management tools that are more automatic and intelligent, Leaman expects, "it will be a lot faster to solve a problem or, if something's gone wrong, we'll be able to get the system up and running a lot faster than before."

New Intelligent Self-Management Infrastructure
So how does all this magic happen? A self-tuning, self-managing database requires the capability to automatically "learn" about how it is being used. "In Oracle Database 10g, we've implemented an entirely new infrastructure that allows the database to capture workload information and use that information to make numerous self-management decisions," says Oracle's Kumar. Instrumentation has been built into every layer of the technology stack, capturing vital metadata that will be used to diagnose problems and storing the information in the database itself in the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)—a fundamental component of the new management infrastructure that plays a central role as the "data warehouse of the database."

Tapping into these mechanisms is a full suite of advisors that provide guidance on how the database operation could be further optimized. SQL Tuning and SQL Access Advisor, for example, provide recommendations for running SQL statements faster. Then there are memory advisors that let you size various memory components without resorting to trial-and-error techniques. There's also a Segment Advisor, which handles all space-related issues, such as recommending wasted-space reclamation, predicting the sizes of new tables and indexes, and analyzing growth trends, and an Undo Advisor, which lets you size the undo tablespace.

A complete alert infrastructure is integrated with these components to notify administrators of any current or impending problems; all of these components are available through the Web-based Enterprise Manager console. Most alerts also contain recommended corrective actions for the problem being reported, which may include invoking one of the advisors—either through Enterprise Manager (EM) or from a command line—to obtain detailed advice. All the necessary infrastructure and related components, such as EM, are installed automatically when you install Oracle Database 10g, whether on a single node or in a Real Application Clusters (RAC) configuration, says Kumar.

Holistic Self-Management
The most revolutionary aspect of the new self-managing Oracle database is its ability to diagnose its own performance problems. Oracle Database 10g includes a self-diagnostic engine built right into the database kernel called Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM). ADDM automatically monitors the state of the database at short, regular intervals (30 minutes by default), providing ongoing database performance diagnostics. Oracle's Kumar likens ADDM to "a genie in your database—if you have a performance problem, you just ask the database what the problem is and it automatically analyzes the complete database system and comes up with recommendations. You get a full list of all the problems ADDM finds and possible solutions to them all." Much of the data in ADDM (and in the other advisors, for that matter) is presented in graphical form—line graphs over time, bar charts, pie charts—as appropriate for the type of data, making it easy to get a sense of things at a glance. Kumar considers ADDM to be a revolutionary breakthrough, with a sophisticated performance diagnostic engine that encapsulates decades of knowledge and experience from Oracle's own performance tuning experts.

In addition to looking at the results of proactive ADDM analysis, you can also run ADDM manually from Enterprise Manager or from the command line, using its PL/SQL interface. ADDM does a top-down analysis of potential bottlenecks, coming up with a set of findings that includes root causes and recommendations with rationale. In addition to identifying problems, ADDM also reports how much impact each of the problems is having on overall system performance and how much benefit can be gained by resolving it. This impact-benefit analysis will help DBAs focus on problems whose resolutions result in the biggest performance gains.

DPITS's Leaman sees many opportunities to leverage ADDM's diagnostic capabilities, even during the development phase of a project lifecycle, allowing developers to "diagnose in advance," before putting any application into production. "We'll be able to system-test even more efficiently before we actually pass it on. We can play if-then-else with the application code—'what happens if we do this?'—a lot more easily than we could before. So we diagnose the system before we pass it on, which I'm expecting will reduce problems." Nonetheless, Leaman says, the major benefit will be to reduce downtime and fix any problems. "Because we've got a history of things going on in the database as well, we can actually look back if there's a problem to be solved and say, 'What was happening at that time; what actually caused the problem?' It all comes down to reduction in downtime or problem-fixing time," says Leaman.

Wayne Hewitt, senior database administrator with SunGard Treasury Systems, agrees. Hewitt works in SunGard's Christchurch, New Zealand, office, a major development shop for SunGard's AvanteGard Quantum product. (AvanteGard Quantum is a treasury management system that provides integrated treasury, risk, accounting, cash management, and other capabilities and is used by many of the world's largest enterprises.) Hewitt keeps more than 500 production, development, support, and QA databases running smoothly, and he helps solve database issues SunGard's AvanteGard Quantum customers might have—if something seems to be a database-related problem, it is likely to land on his desk. According to Hewitt, "the ability to look back in time at the system and specific SQL to identify what bottlenecks there have been is a giant step forward. For example, a common request heard either at a customer site or internally at a development site is, 'Hey, the system or programme is running slower than normal.' By the time you get in and look at the server basics (CPU, memory, disk, and network), and the database (current activity, system tables/views, and run SQL queries) the problem SQL might have finished and you're left without enough information for tuning or preventive measures, and you hope the problem was a one-off query or report, but you can't be sure. Many problems are also hard to re-create. For example, 'why did the automated overnight QA scripts take a lot longer than normal last Monday night?' With these new features, we can properly investigate both problems by going back and taking a look at what took the most resources over that period. We can identify what might have caused the problem and then get expert recommendations from Oracle Database on how to fix it."

The ability to get better diagnostic information is invaluable in both development and production environments. "We just had a customer with an intermittent network issue that affected our application," but the initial diagnosis showed that it was a connection problem with the database, says Hewitt. "If we can go in, see the accurate timings, and examine the history, then this will help us better identify the actual source of the problem. That's a huge benefit for the customer and us."

The advice given on SQL access and SQL tuning cuts across two application types: custom applications you write yourself, so you can fix the code, and packaged applications, whose code you can't fix, in which case the SQL Tuning Advisor calls the optimizer to generate a profile, which is stored in the data dictionary and can be used at runtime. This is how the SQL Tuning Advisor can help speed up packaged applications.

Peter Deusser and Dharmendra Patel of Aventis Pharma see a possibility to get better performance out of vendor applications by using the SQL Access Advisor and the SQL Tuning Advisor. Aventis is a global pharmaceutical company headquartered in Strasbourg, France, and Bridgewater, New Jersey, with research-and-development sites located in Paris, France; Bridgewater, New Jersey; Frankfurt, Germany; and Tokyo, Japan. Deusser is team leader, global strategic services, in the Drug Innovation & Approval (DI&A) division of Aventis; he heads a globally distributed team that includes Patel, a project leader in the New Jersey research-and-development centre. Deusser's team participates in development and integration projects involving different vendor applications, which are all critical to ensuring that Aventis can meet the varied regulatory requirements for releasing drugs around the globe, much of which involves creating extensive documentation that tracks clinical studies, adverse events, and other such information.

Deusser's group is responsible for the databases that manage the later phases of clinical studies, for adverse-event tracking, and for the regulatory databases. According to Deusser, "Because we rely mostly on vendor applications, we can't change or influence the SQL statements they send to the database, if we have performance problems. So we want to be able to get better performance without waiting for a fix from the vendors. If we are able to improve the performance and availability while in production, that's a good choice for us."

DPIT's Leaman also wants to be able to use the SQL Tuning Advisor with packaged applications. "The automatic tuning optimizer takes SQL statements it's getting, notices they're not so good, and optimizes them—without changing the statements themselves. You can actually pick up performance without anyone having to change the application," he explains.

Keeping Businesses Running 24/7
These days, no system can afford downtime. Fortunately, many of the new automated management features in Oracle Database 10g are designed to anticipate and prevent downtime. For example, the optimizer now automatically gathers its own statistics and intelligently refreshes them as needed, when significant changes have been made to the database tables. This is important, because stale statistics can lead to poor performance. Keeping statistics up to date automatically should help a lot of performance problems, says SunGard Treasury Systems' Hewitt. "A common problem at customer sites without database administrators on staff is that people didn't realize they should create and update database statistics," he says. "Customers would complain about bad performance and tell us our application had become a lot slower, especially after major changes. But they weren't keeping their statistics up to date.' So, with that aspect automated, performance of the database and our application will be better and more consistent."

Another feature that will ensure better performance and minimize out-of-memory errors and memory fragmentation problems, says Hewitt, is the new automated system global area (SGA) sizing capability. Rather than manually configuring the amount of memory allocated to the database buffer cache, shared pool, Java pool, and large pool, as in the past, DBAs should use the automatic shared memory-management capability and let Oracle Database 10g manage the memory itself. And because the memory is reallocated across the pools automatically as processing loads change, there "is no longer a requirement to set each SGA component to its maximum required value to handle peak loads," says Hewitt. "Our software will just keep working, and no one will even know that, internally, Oracle has allocated more memory to buffers or the shared pool as required, to improve performance levels and avoid errors. This is a huge benefit for us: Applications will run without memory errors and customers don't have to spend time tuning significant memory parameters, because Oracle Database will use all the allocated memory efficiently."

And of course, the new server-generated alerts help prevent failures from occurring by providing administrators accurate and timely notifications, and guiding them to resolutions proactively.

Performance Art
The automated tuning mechanisms in Oracle Database 10g, particularly the automatic statistics refresh in the optimizer, ADDM, SQL Tuning Advisor, and SQL Access Advisor, not only make the database more manageable and available but also directly affect performance by putting the tuning process within the grasp of any DBA. There's no point to having a database that can perform fast if it requires much effort to achieve that performance, says Vineet Buch, director of Performance Product Management at Oracle: "It's like having a Ferrari you can't drive faster than 65 miles per hour."

In addition, there are some strictly performance-focused improvements, says Buch. Several dozen of these enhancements are completely transparent, and you need do nothing (other than upgrade) to benefit from them. For example, PL/SQL performance is significantly improved, says Buch, because the PL/SQL compiler has been rewritten to generate less, more-optimal code. "We're seeing double-digit performance improvements—and everything is transparent in terms of existing PL/SQL code and applications—no code needs to be rewritten to gain the benefit of this improvement." In short, all PL/SQL code will run faster and use less memory, says Buch.

"Many of the transparent and explicit performance improvements were made for the Windows platform, including 64-bit Oracle on Itanium and Oracle on .NET," says Alex Keh, principal product manager, Windows Technologies group in Oracle's Server Technologies division. In addition, there are several significant enhancements for Windows developers.

Besides transparent performance improvements, such as faster PL/SQL, says Buch, there are several additional new performance-related capabilities DBAs and developers can take advantage of explicitly, many of which fall into the realm of decision-support-system or data warehousing capabilities. For example, applications that require very high data insertion and retrieval rates for first-in, first-out processing—such as the systems used by telecommunications companies to capture telephone call data as it's placed and then generate bills later by retrieving the data in the order received—can gain tremendous performance gains by using Oracle Database 10g's new sorted hash clusters table structure, says Buch.

Beyond the improvements that translate into faster processing speed in the database is another type of "performance" improvement: the way DBAs do their jobs. Bob Shirley of Schlumberger Information Solutions thinks the manageability improvements in Oracle Database 10g are "tremendous in what they can provide the enterprise-level DBA."

The Grid
Many of Oracle Database 10g's new groundbreaking self-management features will directly facilitate the deployment and full-scale operation of data centre management, server consolidation initiatives, and the evolution to commercial grid computing. As Oracle's Sushil Kumar says, "The 'self-managing database' is just one part of the solution. More often than not, an application stack comprises not only the database server but also an application server, application code, and so on—and all these components must be managed as well."

That's where the second major prong in this release of the database—grid management—comes in. According to Stefan Petry, Oracle senior director of product management, System Management Products, EM provides "the management tools and utilities to support the entire system lifecycle. It starts with automated provisioning, includes management and monitoring during system operations, and allows changes and updates while the overall system keeps running." Automating the entire lifecycle is even more critical in a grid, because "you need to do all this efficiently and reliably across a very large number of components," says Petry. Furthermore, you want a single system to monitor and manage all types of elements—the database, applications, hosts, and storage and network elements. In a grid, says Petry, you'll find all of these elements, and you want to be able to do any of these operations on all elements, gridwide.

Using EM, administrators not only have access to key Oracle Database 10g features, such as ADDM, but they can also manage third-party grid components such as load balancers and storage systems, says Petry. The Web-based EM manages any number of Oracle databases; Oracle application server farms; and their hosts, such as Linux or UNIX hosts. "Furthermore, EM Application Performance Management (APM) monitors the real-time performance of your Web applications," explains Petry. "APM does that from an end-user perspective for all your users and your critical transactions and allows you to drill down into individual components for detailed root-cause analysis."

Managing Complexity with Power to Spare
The desire to gain the benefits of better management of systems and lower costs has been the impetus for the "strong trend toward more server consolidation since 1997," according to Gartner Group. In "Server Consolidation: An Updated Look" (May 23, 2003), Gartner analysts John Phelps and Mike Chuba write, "The magnitude of the server management problem can be seen in the typical enterprise data centre, which probably contains hundreds of Unix and Intel servers. Adding a single application typically adds three to five servers to the data centre for such things as production, development, testing, and backup. Many of the distributed servers run at low utilizations. No wonder, then, that enterprises are seeking to consolidate their servers."

The self-management capabilities of Oracle Database 10g help maximize the use of existing resources, helping to eliminate the need to purchase additional hardware frequently. For example, the Automatic Shared Memory Management feature allows the most optimal use of available SGA memory, and the ability to reclaim space from existing tables can eliminate the need to buy additional storage. Those are some of the benefits Aventis' Deusser hopes to achieve over the long term with consolidation projects. With more than 100 databases to manage, Deusser says, "We are looking at getting better manageability. It should be easier if we consolidate all our different databases together in only a few boxes."

Minimizing the complexity, containing the cost, and getting more value from existing technology resources is a key focus for organizations worldwide, making Oracle Database 10g a trendsetter indeed.

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