Oracle University Podcast

In this special episode of the Oracle University Podcast, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Principal HCM Instructor Jeff Schuster, delve into the intersection of HCM and AI, exploring the practical applications and implications of this technology in human resources.

Jeff shares his insights on bias and fairness, the importance of human involvement, and the need for explainability and transparency in AI systems. The discussion also covers the various AI features embedded in HCM and their impact on talent acquisition, performance management, and succession planning.

Oracle AI in Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/learning-path/oracle-ai-in-fusion-cloud-human-capital-management-hcm/136722

Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM: Dynamic Skills: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-fusion-cloud-hcm-dynamic-skills/116654/

Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu

Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.

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00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!

00:26

Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs here at Oracle University, and with me, is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services.

Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week’s conversation was all about Oracle Database 23ai backup and recovery, where we dove into instance recovery and effective recovery strategies. Today’s episode is a really special one, isn’t it, Lois?

00:53

Lois: It is, indeed, Niki. Of course, all of our AI episodes are special. But today, we have our friend and colleague Jeff Schuster with us. I think our listeners are really going to enjoy what Jeff has to share with us.

Nikita: Yeah definitely! Jeff is a Principal HCM Instructor at Oracle University. He recently put together this really fantastic course on MyLearn, all about the intersection of HCM and AI, and that’s what we want to pick his brain about today. Hi Jeff! We’re so excited to have you here.

01:22

Jeff: Hey Niki! Hi Lois! I feel special already. Thanks you guys so much for having me.

Nikita: You’ve had a couple of busy months, haven’t you?

01:29

Jeff: I have! It’s been a busy couple of months with live classes. I try and do one on AI in HCM at least once a month or so so that we can keep up with the latest/greatest stuff in that area. And I also got to spend a few days at Cloud World teaching a few live classes (about artificial intelligence in HCM, as a matter of fact) and meeting our customers and partners. So yeah, absolutely great week. A good time was had by me.

01:55

Lois: I’m sure. Cloud World is such a great experience. And just to clarify, do you think our customers and partners also had a good time, Jeff? It wasn’t just you, right?

Jeff: Haha! I don’t think it was just me, Lois. But, you know, HCM is always a big deal, and now with all the embedded AI functionality, it really wasn’t hard to find people who wanted to spend a little extra time talking about AI in the context of our HCM apps. So, there are more than 30 separate AI-powered features in HCM. AI features for candidates to find the right jobs; for hiring managers to find the right candidates; skills, talent, performance management, succession planning— all of it is there and it really covers everything across the Attract/Grow/Keep buckets of the things that HR professionals do for a living. So, anyway, yeah, lots to talk about with a lot of people!

There’s the functional part that people want to know about—what are these features and how do they work? But obviously, AI carries with it all this cultural significance these days. There’s so much uncertainty that comes from this pace of development in that area. So in fact, my Cloud World talk always starts with this really silly intro that we put in place just to knock down that anxiety and get to the more practical, ...

00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!

00:26

Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.

Nikita: Hi everyone! In our last episode, we dove into database sharding and Oracle Database Sharding in particular. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I’d suggest you go back and do so before you listen to this episode because it will give you a lot of context.

00:53

Lois: Right, Niki. Today, we will discuss all the 23ai new features related to database sharding. We will cover sharding native replication, directory-based sharding, coordinated backup and restore for sharded databases, and a few more.

Nikita: And we’re so happy to have Ron Soltani back on the podcast. If you don’t already know him, Ron is a Senior Principal Database & Security Instructor with Oracle University. Hi Ron! Let’s talk about sharding native replication, which is RAFT-based, meaning that it is reliable and fault tolerant-based, usually providing subzero or subsecond zero data loss replication support. Tell us more about it, please.

01:33

Ron: This is completely transparent replication built in within Oracle sharding that duplicates data across the different shards. So data are generally put into chunks. And then the chunks are replicated either between three or five different shards, depending on how much of the fault tolerance is required. This is completely provided by the Oracle sharding database, and does not require use of any other component like GoldenGate and Data Guard. So if you remember when we talked about the architecture, we said that each shard, each database can have a Data Guard component, whether through GoldenGate or whether through Data Guard to have a standby. And that way support high availability with the sharding native replication, you don't rely on the secondary database. You actually-- the shards will back each other up by holding replicas and being able to globally manage the replica, make sure everything is preserved, and manage all of the fault operations. Now this is a logical replication, generally consensus-based, kind of like different components all aware of each other. They know which component is good, depending on the load, depending on the failure. The sharded databases behind the scene decide who is actually serving the data to the client. That can provide subsecond failovers with zero data loss.

03:15

Lois: And what are the benefits of this?

Ron: Major benefits for having sharding native replication is that it is completely transparent to the application or any of the structures. You just identify that you want to go ahead and use this replication and identify the replication factor. The rest is managed by the Oracle sharded database behind the scene. It supports fast failover with zero data loss, usually subsecond failovers. And depending on the number of replicas, it can even tolerate multiple failures like two server failures.

And when the loads are submitted, the loads are also load-balanced across all of these shards based on where the data is located, based on the replicas. So...

00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!

00:26

Lois: Hello and welcome back to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services.

Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we looked at two Oracle Database 23ai new features related to Data Manipulation Language, or DML. One was Unrestricted Parallel DMLs and the other was Unrestricted Direct Loads. Do check out that episode if you missed it.

00:56

Lois: Today, we have Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor, Bill Millar, with us. He’s been on several times this season taking us through all the different 23ai new features. In this episode, we’re going to ask him about the Automatic Transaction Rollback feature. Hi Bill! What is automatic transaction rollback and why is it an important feature for database administrators?

01:22

Bill: We can now have transactions that are blocking other transactions, depending on some settings, to automatically roll back. It does require some parameters to be set. Rows basically get locked in a single row. Each row is locked based off of what type of activity is being performed on that row, such as inserts, updates, deletes, merge, select for updates.

01:52

Nikita: And how were things before this feature?

Bill: Traditionally, the database administrator had to research and manually terminate blocking transactions, or there are some things that resource manager might have been able to do.

02:05

Lois: This seems like such a game-changer for DBAs, Bill. So, how does it work?

Bill: So there are some parameters that control the automatic rollback. One is the transaction priority. We're going to set that priority for a transaction either to medium, high, or low. We have the high priority wait target and a medium priority wait target that we can set.

The high wait target will terminate if a medium transaction is blocking that high target based off of the values that we set, the medium transaction can be terminated. A medium transaction will terminate a low priority. So if a transaction designated as low exceeds the blocking time that we set for the medium priority wait time, then it'll be terminated. Whereas, the high priority will terminate both medium and low transactions.

We have the rollback mode. We're either going to roll back or we're going to track, depending on what we're trying to do.

03:10

Nikita: So, if I decide that I want to use automatic transaction rollback... if I decide to implement it...I’ll need to set those parameters, right?

Bill: So we can set those at a session level. We also have some system level wait targets. What are the wait times for the medium, high transactions? How long they are going to wait for those lower transactions?

And then we also have the rollback mode. Are we actually going to roll back or are we just going to track for right now? We have to determine what is going to be the wait times for those transactions that we want to wait before those lower transactions, priority transactions are rolled back?

At that session level, we're going to set...

00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!

00:26

Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs.

Lois: Hi everyone! Last week, we discussed how OKE virtual nodes can offer you a complete serverless Kubernetes experience.

Nikita: Yeah, and in today’s episode, we’ll focus on self-managed nodes, where you get complete control over the worker nodes within your OKE environment. We’ll also talk about how you can manage your Kubernetes deployments.

00:57

Lois: To tell us more about this, we have Mahendra Mehra, a senior OCI instructor with Oracle University. Hi Mahendra! Welcome back! Let’s get started with self-managed nodes. Can you tell us what they are?

Mahendra: In Container Engine for Kubernetes, a self-managed node is essentially a worker node that you personally create and host on a compute instance or instance pool within the compute service.

Unlike managed nodes or virtual nodes, self-managed nodes are not grouped into node pools by default. They are often referred to as Bring Your Own Nodes, also abbreviated as BYON. If you wish to streamline administration and manage multiple self-managed nodes collectively, you can utilize the compute service to create a compute instance pool for hosting these nodes. This allows for greater flexibility and customization in your Kubernetes environment.

01:58

Nikita: Mahendra, what are some practical usage scenarios for OKE self-managed nodes?

Mahendra: These nodes offer a range of advantages for specific use cases. Firstly, for specialized workloads, leveraging the compute service allows you to configure compute instances with shapes and image combination that may not be available for managed nodes or virtual nodes.

This includes options like GPU shapes for hardware accelerated workloads or high frequency processor cores for demanding high-performance computing tasks. Secondly, if you require complete control over your compute instance configuration, self-managed nodes are the ideal choice. This gives you the flexibility to tailor each node to your specific requirements.

Additionally, self-managed nodes are particularly well suited for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure cluster networks. These nodes provide high bandwidth, low latency RDMA connectivity, making them a preferred option for certain networking setups.

Lastly, the use of compute instance pools with self-managed nodes enables the creation of infrastructure for handling complex distributed computing tasks. This can greatly enhance the efficiency of your Kubernetes environment. Consider these points carefully to determine the optimal use of OKE self-managed nodes in your deployments.

03:30

Lois: What do we need to consider before creating a self-managed node and integrating it into a cluster?

Mahendra: There are two crucial aspects to address. Firstly, you need to confirm that the cluster to which you plan to add a self-managed node is configured appropriately.

Secondly, it's essential to choose the right image for the compute instance hosting the self-managed node.

03:53

Nikita: Can you dive a little deeper into these prerequisites?

Mahendra: To su...

00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!

00:26

Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.

Nikita: Hi everyone! Thank you for joining us as we begin a new season of the podcast. For the next few weeks, we’re going to explore all the new features in Oracle Database 23ai, previously known as 23c. These episodes will be great for you if you’re a database administrator, a developer, or even a database architect.

Lois: Right Niki, and while anyone can listen to the podcast, you’re probably going to get the most out of this season if you have prior knowledge or experience with the previous versions of Oracle Database and have used SQL to manage Oracle Databases. Throughout this season, we’ll discuss new features in database availability, architecture, manageability, performance, and security.

01:21

Nikita: Exactly. Today, we're diving into the world of blockchain tables and the new features introduced. First, we'll try to get an overview of blockchain tables that were introduced in 21c. Then, we'll discuss the new features in 23ai, including row versions, user chains, delegate signer, and countersignature.

Lois: So, let’s get started. To take us through all this, we are joined today by Bill Millar. Bill is a Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor with Oracle University. Hi Bill! Thanks for joining us. To begin, what is a blockchain table?

01:59

Bill: Well, a blockchain table provides the means for recording transactions where only insert operations are allowed. And rows are protected or restricted based on time as defined when the table is created. This makes the rows tamper-resistant with their chaining algorithms.

02:16

Nikita: Bill, take us through some common attributes of a blockchain table.

Bill: They are append only, protects the current data in the table. Made tamper-resistant with their hashing algorithm. And optionally, they can be digitally signed. However, they are mandatory in blockchain platform transactions. Transaction logs, audit trails, compliance information, they can most benefit from using blockchain tables.

02:44

Lois: Bill, let’s talk for a minute about the blockchain tables being tamper-resistant. What makes a blockchain table tamper-proof?

Bill: Well, with the insert only tables, each row is going to be chained to the previous row, except the first row. There's nothing to change it to. So once a row is added, it changes it to the previous row, to the previous row. Rows are linked when the transaction commits. We don't link them beforehand because you might roll back.

03:13

Nikita: Do we have some considerations or guidelines for managing blockchain tables?

Bill: One, they may be partitioned. You can specify retention at a table level, the blockchain table itself. You can use the no drop clause. And you can also define it blockchain tables at the row level when you create that blockchain table. Defining a retention period for the table itself or a retention period for the rows.

03:41

Nikita: And are there any restrictions when using blockc...