Oracle University Podcast

Curious about how OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) can transform the way your development team builds, deploys, and manages cloud-native applications? Listen to hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham explore OKE's key features and benefits with senior OCI instructor Mahendra Mehra. Mahendra breaks down complex concepts into digestible bits, making it easy for you to understand the magic behind OKE. OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes Specialist: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oci-container-engine-for-kubernetes-specialist/134971/210836 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

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!

00:25

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 there! If you’ve been listening to us these last few weeks, you’ll know we’ve been discussing containerization, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry, and the basics of Kubernetes. Today, we’ll dive into the world of OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes, also referred to as OKE.

Nikita: We’re joined by Mahendra Mehra, a senior OCI instructor with Oracle University, who will take us through the key features and benefits of OKE and also talk about working with managed nodes. Hi Mahendra! Thanks for joining us today.

01:09

Lois: So, Mahendra, what is OKE exactly?

Mahendra: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes is a fully managed, scalable, and highly available service that empowers you to effortlessly deploy your containerized applications to the cloud.

But that's just the beginning. OKE can transform the way you and your development team build, deploy, and manage cloud native applications.

01:36

Nikita: What would you say are some of its most defining features? Mahendra: One of the defining features of OKE is the flexibility it offers. You can specify whether you want to run your applications on virtual nodes or opt for managed nodes.

Regardless of your choice, Container Engine for Kubernetes will efficiently provision them within your existing OCI tenancy on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Creating OKE cluster is a breeze, and you have a couple of fantastic tools at your disposal-- the console and the rest API. These make it super easy to get started.

OKE relies on Kubernetes, which is an open-source system that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of hosts.

Kubernetes is an incredible system that groups containers into logical units known as pods. And these pods make managing and discovering your applications very simple.

Not to mention, Container Engine for Kubernetes uses Kubernetes versions that are certified as conformant by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, also abbreviated as CNCF. And here's the icing on the cake. Container Engine for Kubernetes is ISO-compliant. The other two ISO-IEC standards—27001, 27017, and 27018. That's your guarantee of a secure and reliable platform. 03:08

Lois: That’s great. But how do you access all this power?

Mahendra: You can define and create your Kubernetes cluster using the intuitive console and the robust rest API. Once your clusters are up and running, you can manage them using the Kubernetes command line, also known as kubectl, the user-friendly Kubernetes dashboard, and the powerful Kubernetes API.

03:32

Nikita: I love the idea of an intuitive console and being able to manage everything from a centralized place.

Lois: Yeah, that’s fantastic! Mahendra, can you talk us through the magic that happens behind the scenes? What’s Oracle’s role in all this?

Mahendra: All the master nodes or control plane nodes are managed by Oracle. This includes components like etcd, the API server, and the con...

In this episode, Senior Principal APEX and Apps Dev Instructor Brent Dayley joins hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham to discuss Oracle AI Vector Search. Brent provides an in-depth overview, shedding light on the brand-new vector data type, vector embeddings, and the vector workflow. Oracle Database 23ai: Oracle AI Vector Search Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-oracle-ai-vector-search-fundamentals/140188/ Oracle Database 23ai: SQL Workshop: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-sql-workshop/137830/ 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, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. --------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

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. Joining me as always is our Team Lead of our Editorial Services, Nikita Abraham.

Nikita: Hi everyone! Thanks for tuning in over the last few months as we’ve been discussing all the Oracle Database 23ai new features. We’re coming to the end of the season, and to close things off, in this episode and the next one, we’re going to be talking about the fundamentals of Oracle AI Vector Search. In today’s episode, we’ll try to get an overview of what vector search is, why Oracle Vector Search stands out, and dive into the new vector data type. We’ll also get insights into vector embedding models and the vector workflow.

01:11

Lois: To take us through all of this, we’re joined by Brent Dayley, who is a Senior Principal APEX and Apps Development Instructor with Oracle University. Hi Brent! Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us about the new vector data type?

Brent: So this data type was introduced in Oracle Database 23ai. And it allows you to store vector embeddings alongside other business data. Now, the vector data type allows a foundation to store vector embeddings.

01:42

Lois: And what are vector embeddings, Brent?

Brent: Vector embeddings are mathematical representations of data points. They assign mathematical representations based on meaning and context of your unstructured data. You have to generate vector embeddings from your unstructured data either outside or within the Oracle Database. In order to get vector embeddings, you can either use ONNX embedding machine learning models or access third-party REST APIs. Embeddings can be used to represent almost any type of data, including text, audio, or visual, such as pictures. And they are used in proximity searches.

02:28

Nikita: Hmmm, proximity search. And similarity search, right? Can you break down what similarity search is and how it functions?

Brent: So vector data tends to be unevenly distributed and clustered into groups that are semantically related. Doing a similarity search based on a given query vector is equivalent to retrieving the k nearest vectors to your query vector in your vector space. What this means is that basically you need to find an ordered list of vectors by ranking them, where the first row is the closest or most similar vector to the query vector. The second row in the list would be the second closest vector to the query vector, and so on, depending on your data set. What we need to do is to find the relative order of distances. And that's really what matters rather than the actual distance.

Now, similarity searches tend to get data from one or more clusters, depending on the value of the query vector and the fetch size. Approximate searches using vector indexes can limit the searches to specific clusters. Exact searches visit vectors across all clusters.

03:44

Lois: Ok. I want to move on to vector embedding models. What are they and why are they valuable?

Brent: Vector emb...

Want to gain insights into how virtual nodes provide a serverless Kubernetes experience? Join hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with senior OCI instructor Mahendra Mehra, as they compare managed nodes and virtual nodes. Continuing from the previous episode, they explore how virtual nodes enhance Kubernetes deployments in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes Specialist: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oci-container-engine-for-kubernetes-specialist/134971/210836 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

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!

00:25

Lois: 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: Hey everyone! In our last episode, we examined OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes, including its key features and benefits.

Lois: Yeah, that was an interesting one. Today, we’re going to discuss virtual nodes and their role in enhancing Kubernetes deployments in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Nikita: We’re going to compare virtual nodes and managed nodes, and look at their differences and advantages. To take us through all this, we have Mahendra Mehra with us. Mahendra is a senior OCI instructor with Oracle University.

01:09

Lois: Hi Mahendra! From our discussion last week, we know that when creating a node pool with Container Engine for Kubernetes, we have the option of specifying the type of Oracle nodes as either managed nodes or virtual nodes. But I’m sure there are some key differences in the features supported by each type, right?

Mahendra: The primary point of differentiation between virtual nodes and managed nodes is in their management approach. When it comes to managed nodes, users are responsible for managing the nodes. They have the flexibility to configure them to meet the specific requirements.

Users are also responsible for upgrading Kubernetes on managed nodes and for managing cluster capacity. You can create managed nodes and node pools in both basic clusters and enhanced clusters, whereas in virtual nodes, virtual nodes provide a serverless Kubernetes, experience, enabling users to run containerized applications at scale. The Kubernetes software is upgraded and security patches are applied while respecting application's availability requirements. You can only create virtual nodes and virtual node pools in enhanced clusters.

02:17

Nikita: What about differences in terms of resource allocation? Are there any differences we should be aware of?

Mahendra: When it comes to managed nodes, the resource allocation is at the node pool level and the users specify CPU and memory resource requirements for a given node pool. In the virtual nodes, the resource allocation is done at the pod level, where you can specify the CPU and memory resource requirements, but this time, as requests and limits in the pod specification.

02:45

Lois: What about differences in the approach to load balancing?

Mahendra: When it comes to managed nodes, load balancing is between the worker nodes, whereas in virtual nodes, load balancing is between pods.

Also, load balancer security list management is never enabled, and you always must manually configure security rules. When using virtual nodes, load balances distribute traffic among pods' IP addresses and then assign node port.

03:12

Lois: And when it comes to pod networking?

Mahendra: Under managed nodes, both the VCN-Native Pod Networking CNI plugin and the flannel CNI plugin are supported. When it comes to virtual nodes, only VCN-Native Pod Networking is supported.

Also, only one VNIC is attached to each virtual node. Remember, IP addresses are not pre-allocated before pods are created. And the VCN-Native Pod Networking CNI plugin is not shown...

Join hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham in Part 2 of the discussion on database sharding with Ron Soltani, a Senior Principal Database & Security Instructor. They talk about sharding native replication, directory-based sharding, and coordinated backup and restore for sharded databases, explaining how these features work and their benefits. Additionally, they explore the automatic bulk data move on sharding keys and the ability to split and move partition sets, highlighting the flexibility and efficiency they bring to data management. Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-new-features-for-administrators/137192/207062 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

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...

Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham as they discuss the Automatic Transaction Rollback feature with Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor, Bill Millar. Bill explains that in the 23ai release, transactions blocking other transactions can now be automatically rolled back, depending on certain parameters. Bill highlights the advantages of using automatic transaction rollback, which eliminates the time-consuming process of manually terminating blocking transactions. They also cover the workload reduction benefits for database administrators. Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-new-features-for-administrators/140830/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

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...