LMT Episode 01 - Oracle 12c Multi-tenant

12/05/14 • 8 min

Thanks for Downloading this episode. Thanks again for the feedback on the previous first episode. The sound quality was not great and we had a few bloopers. I hope this recording is a little better. If you would like to contribute or have any Oracle licence questions please contact me via the contact page at Madora.co.uk or email me. [email protected] Does 12c Multi-tenant offer real opportunity for cost savings through consolidation? For those not familiar with Oracle 12c, which was released in June last year, it offers a host of new features. The ‘C’ in 12c stands for Cloud and it is focused firmly on providing a back bone for the Oracle Cloud strategy. With all the announcements around cloud, DBaaS, PaaS and the like, I thought it worthy of giving an introduction to Oracle 12c for the non technical – well not too technical. Some four years in development this was a major release with a fundamental new architecture. Oracle Database 12c provides a bunch of extras such as database consolidation, query optimisation, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, backup and recovery. Tom Kyte does a nice job of explaining the new features in YouTube for those who are a bit more technically minded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTTXoHBmWw&feature=youtu.be It is the database consolidation capability via pluggable databases that really are the game changer for consolidation. Officially now known as multi-tenant, this is a paid for option that could have a massive impact on the cost of building and running a large database estate. So what is the multi-tenant option? In simple terms I like to think of the Multi-tenant option as an egg box which is the container database, holding many eggs which are the pluggable databases. The egg box provides the ability to share its memory and background processes across the many eggs it holds. The egg box holds the metadata and the eggs hold the user data. Traditional database architecture requires each database instance to have a discrete set of memory and storage allocated to it. Sometimes this results in poorly utilised resources. Clearly as your database estate grew you could find yourself buying more memory and storage on a regular basis. This also has an impact on management as more effort is required to manage and maintain the hardware infrastructure as well as the growing instances of databases. Add the non-production environments and the disaster recovery and backup options and the physical servers can soon sprawl. One of the solutions pursued by a great number of organisations to the physical server sprawl was the use of virtualisation software. Although this has greater benefits in physical server reduction it still required each oracle database instance to have its own resources set aside. Multi-tenant databases offer an additional level of consolidation by sharing the database resources amongst the pluggable databases. You can create up to 253 pluggable databases all managed as a single instance via the container database. That is one giant egg box! In production environments it is not uncommon to see 20 different instances all requiring routine maintenance from upgrades, patches, tuning, back up and configured for RAC and Data Guard. With Oracle 12c Multi-tenant all 20 instances can be treated as one. A DBA can easily plug or unplug an existing database to or from a container database. There is no need to change any code in the application. When the user connects to a plugged database, the database environment looks exactly as if the user had connected to a traditional database. The Multi-tenant option helps provide the following: High consolidation density: Many databases can share memory and background processes, reducing significant hardware. Provisioning: A database can be unplugged from one environment and plugged into another in seconds using SQL commands. Spinning up and cloning new instances for test and dev is now a breeze. Patching and upgrades: Patch a new container. Now unplug from the un-patched container and plug into the patch container – job done. Manage many databases as one: Do your routine tasks like back up on the container database not individual instances. An order of magnitude when you consider a container can hold 253 databases! Resource management: The Oracle Resource Manager feature can work at the pluggable database level for you to manage resource competition among the databases in your environment. In the words of Oracle senior vice president Andy Mendelsohn, Pluggable databases represent “a fundamental rearchitecture of the [Oracle] database. Now if I’m an administrator, I have one database overall to administer.” Can 12c really deliver substantial cost savings? There is no denying there are cost benefits to be gained through increased agility via rapid cloning, reduced overheads in management and lower hardware infrastructure. It was a disappointment to a number of customers that this became a paid option. T...

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LMT Episode 03 - 5 Fatal Licence Mistakes

So news last month of Thomas Kurian, Larry Ellison and Flexcube in the cloud. The featured article this episode is one of our most popular posts, “5 Fatal Mistakes of Oracle licensing.” For all you kind people who have downloaded, please provide feedback and questions. We would love to address any questions on the show. I am currently reaching out to a bunch of very interesting people to have on the show. If you would like to be on the show please get in touch. Thomas Kurian Promoted to President Almost four months since Larry Ellison handed his CEO title to both Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, he has now promoted Thomas Kurian to President. The forty-eight year old was EVP for product development having started his Oracle career leading the Middleware strategy. He helped take Oracle to a leader in the Middleware with the suite of Middleware tools. Larry helps the critters Larry is clearly a busy man and is putting some of his substantial wealth to helping establish a Wildlife breeding and animal rehab centre in the Santa Cruz mountains. Read more at NBC The Bay Area News Oracle Cloud runs a new UK Bank Hampden & Co. will be running Oracle’s core banking solution Flexcube on Oracle cloud. Oracle will run the application as a managed service on Oracle Sparc T5 out of the UK Oracle data center in Linlithgow, just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Hampden Group run a diversified set of services in the insurance and finance sectors. They announced last year that they would be taking a significant stake in a new bank for private clients called Hampden & Co plc. oracle licensing rules – 5 Fatal Mistakes “Five Fatal Oracle License Mistakes”, alright the title is a bit dramatic, but the following 5 mistakes crop up on such a regular basis that we at Madora believe they are worth reiterating. For those experienced with Oracle, they will know the following as classic gotchas and will keep an eye out. IT professionals and Procurement Officers new to the ways of Oracle may get caught out – so be warned. Let’s walk through some of the five common areas that often have disastrous consequences. The Five Fatal Mistakes are: 1. Virtualising without fully understanding the implications. The issue we see time after time is misunderstanding Oracle licensing on VMware. So why is this? It’s to do with server partitioning. Server partitioning can be very confusing; it is designed to limit the amount of processor resource available to a program; it is nothing to do with the Oracle Database Partitioning extra cost option – that is a means of partitioning data tables. Oracle simplifies server partitioning into two groups; the methods that it refuses to recognise as valid, known as “Soft Partitioning”; and those it accepts really do subdivide servers, known as “Hard Partitioning”. Probably the most popular server partitioning method is VMware, a very flexible form of partitioning and a great means of managing a datacentre. Guess what? It is soft partitioning for Oracle; this means that it is incredibly easy to fall foul of Oracle’s licensing rules. How your VCenter is set up, the clusters, the VMs, the storage architecture all have an impact on licensing. VMware publish guidelines on how to license Oracle but Oracle don’t support their view; great fun when it is your turn for Oracle’s regular license audit! Oracle’s approach to VMware has changed even further since the release of VMware Version 5.1 with its more advanced DRS/VMotion capabilities and its shared storage functionality. Seek independent help to review your architecture and any planned changes; don’t assume anything!! 2. Disaster Recovery scenarios not licensed correctly This can be a complex area with technologies changing all the time. We highly recommend you speak to Madora Consulting if you have any doubts as to whether you are correctly licensed for DR architectures. In general we advise that you assume you need to be licensed fully and then check to see if your scenario falls under failover and whether the 10 day rule applies. In terms of licensing be aware that you cannot mix metrics. In other words if processors are used for the primary site then the backup site also needs to be licensed by processor. A common mistake is believing that Named User Plus licenses can be used for the backup site – in the hope of saving money. You are better off ring fencing the DR servers contractually and negotiating a reduced cost for this license pool. Also make sure that the options and management packs are licensed, as these are often forgotten. In short, scenarios where the Primary and Secondary nodes share a SAN, with the secondary node acting as a failover, only the Primary needs to be licensed. This is valid as long as the failover to the secondary lasts less than 10 days per year, which includes any testing. Any standby or mirroring environments must be fully licensed. See the Oracle paper on DR pricing http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/data-recovery-licensing-070...