Well, it’s everyone’s first Oracle Cloud World 😊 so, we do not compare the logistics, attendance, food, and entertainment with a previous Oracle Open World. Overall, I felt good attending a large conference after almost three years! It is so good to see people, network, chat, party, work and do some learning. I won’t talk about the first part, but here are a few new things (announcements) I learned from OCW2022.
Multi-cloud
We heard multi-cloud everywhere! That’s the new Oracle Mantra. Hybrid multi-cloud is the new normal (if we can sort out the security implications properly). Multi-cloud is a cloud computing strategy that uses the best services from more than one cloud provider to deploy a solution. It’s typically driven by workload, business, and data governance requirements. A multi-cloud solution integrates IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Customers get the best-in-class products from the cloud provider without vendor lock-in. Oracle started the multi-cloud revolution a few years ago with the OCI-Azure interconnect, where we can run databases on OCI and application servers on Azure. This year we saw a few more announcements to strengthen the multi-cloud message.
- Oracle Database Service for Azure
- Oracle MySQL Heatwave on AWS
- Oracle MySQL Heatwave on Azure
- Clay’s keynote demonstrated OCI-connected data center with AWS. The demo showed an AWS company expanding to OCI (watch keynote What’s new and next for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure—Clay Magouyrk Keynote | CloudWorld 2022 – YouTube)
Oracle Alloy
One of the major announcements at OCW was Oracle Alloy. Simply, it is white-labeling OCI services for hosting providers or setting up Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in your data center for security or data sovereignty reasons. Oracle Alloy has more potential in countries where a major cloud player does not have a data center (region), and the local hosting providers can sell the OCI-like services on their terms. With Oracle Alloy, Oracle is making the entire cloud service portfolio available to run on-premises.
Read more: Oracle Alloy | Oracle
Larry’s keynote address
Larry’s keynote was a little different this year. I did not hear any competitor comparisons, probably because of the new multi-cloud adoption strategy (well, I heard a short comparison of MySQL with AWS Aurora). Larry spent over 90% of his keynote talking about healthcare data management and his vision to provide new-generation medical information systems and tools for medical professionals.
Watch Solving the most complex problems across industries—Larry Ellison Keynote | CloudWorld 2022 – YouTube
Oracle Database 23c
Oracle Database 23c beta program is open (happy to be a part of it, I have not started testing yet, but soon). There were quite a few sessions talking about Oracle Database 23c new features. Some of the features I like the most are:
- Increased number of columns per table (1000 to 4096)
- SELECT without a FROM clause (no need to use DUAL everywhere!)
- Schema level privileges (a much awaited and useful feature)
- GROUP BY clause can use column alias or column position
- Oracle RAC local rolling patches
- IF EXISTS or IF NOT EXISTS clause for DDL statements (CREATE TABLE abc IF NOT EXIST, DROP TABLE abc IF EXISTS)
- Golden Gate Free (for databases 20GB or less)
OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery Service
Though we had a preview of OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery Service (OFSDRS) by participating in the beta program, the official announcement was at OCW. OFSDRS allows customers to monitor and manage the entire disaster recovery process of their entire technology stack from the OCI console. It manages disaster recovery for applications, middleware, networks, storage, and compute for a variety of disaster recovery topologies. Here is the hands-on live labs for Full Stack DR Services Protect your business using Full Stack Disaster Recovery (oracle.com)
MySQL Heatwave
The mySQL team needs special mention, I saw a lot of interest in MySQL sessions, especially Heatwave. Oracle DBAs I talked to are curious about the capabilities of MySQL Heatwave and if there are any easy migration opportunities. Heatwave increases MySQL performance by orders of magnitude for analytics workloads. Heatwave eliminates the need for a separate analytics database, separate machine learning (ML) tools, and extract, transform, and load (ETL) duplication. Heatwave using columnar in-memory, suitable for data warehouse and analytical processing. Heatwave can also easily scale horizontally. Read more about Heatwave performance here: MySQL HeatWave Technical brief (oracle.com).
I could not join Steve Miranda’s Oracle Fusion Applications keynote. I will watch his keynote and some of the sessions I missed in the coming days. As a reminder, Oracle Cloud World keynotes and digital content (free registration required) are available here: Keynotes On Demand | Oracle CloudWorld 2022
Biju Thomas heads Data Intensity’s Global Oracle Practice and is an Oracle ACE Director. Connect with Biju on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bijut or email him at bithomas@dataintensity.com.