In the midst of us needing to do more with less every day, many of us are incorporating clones to simplify data refreshes to non-production database environments. Working harder is just not an option when we can use newer technology to get more by doing less. Knowing Your Environment Doing less effectively requires some planning for Oracle and a few questions to be asked: Will you need to deploy to a new host/VM target as part of a clone? Will an image with Oracle be used for the new Host/VM target or will you need to build out the Oracle…
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So where did 2017 go?!?!? I really, really would like to know… Needless to say, it’s time to do a year in review already and I actually have time to do it this year! DBAKevlar Blog I wrote over 100 blog posts this year between DBAKevlar, Delphix and partner sites, but I’ve enjoyed sharing with the different communities. There’s significant changes going on in the IT world regarding the future of the Database Administrator. This deafening message came through when pulling together my top blog posts for 2017, with Death of the DBA, Long Live the DBA presenting itself as…
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Delphix focuses on virtualizing non-production environments, easing the pressure on DBAs, resources and budget, but there is a second use case for product that we don’t discuss nearly enough. Protection from data loss. Jamie Pope, one of the great guys that works in our pre-sales engineering group, sent Adam and I an article on one of those situations that makes any DBA, (or an entire business, for that matters) cringe. GitLab.com was performing some simple maintenance and someone deleted the wrong directory, removing over 300G of production data from their system. It appears they were first going to use PostgreSQL…
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About year ago or more, Oracle came out with a way to create thin clone copies of a database in EM 12c called “Snap Clone”. Not sure this makes working with data any sunnier and certainly doesn’t add any sunlight to the cloud movement. Snap Clone technology has seen little adoption AFAIK. I’m not aware of a single customer reference yet, besides internal usage at Oracle. Why ? Because Snap Clone doesn’t solve the real problem. Snap Clone is complex, depends on cobbling other technologies together, and lacks in crucial features. The real solution is simplicity and end-to-end integration with data source syncing all…
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Performance testing requires full, fresh data Many organizations don’t even attempt to test performance until very late in their development cycle because it is only in the UAT (or equivalent) environment that they have a full copy of their production data set. Errors and inefficiencies found at this stage are expensive to fix and are often promoted to production due to pressures from the business to meet release schedules. Delphix customers give each developer, or team of developers, a full, fresh copy of the database where they can validate the performance of their code in the UNIT TESTING phase of…
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Oracle 12c introduces the new Pluggable Database (PDB) functionality into the Oracle database. What’s the advantage of PDBs? PDBs eliminate the heavy memory overhead of starting up a full Oracle instance requiring a new SGA and full set of background processes. Instead, we startup one container database (CDB) and then PDBs all share resources of the CDB. With a CDB & PDBs, there is one instance, one set of background processes, one SGA and these are shared among the PDBs. Starting a PDB only requires about 100MB of memory as opposed to half a GB normally required to start…
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Oracle OEM 12c introduces a new feature that enables the creation of Oracle database thin clones by leveraging file system snapshot technologies from either ZFS or Netapp. The OEM adds a graphic interface to the process of making database thin clones. The feature that enables database thin cloning in OEM is called Snap Clone and is part of OEM’s Cloud Control Self Service for data cloning. Snap Clone is available via the feature Database as a Service (DBaaS). Snap clone leverages the copy on write technologies available in some storage systems for database cloning. Support is initially available for NAS…