Friday, July 29, 2011

Love-Hate Relationships Between Oracle and their Customers ...

There is nothing more enlightening than spending days with IT end-users discussing their challenges with managing Big Data stored in Oracle. Ok?maybe I am just a nerd that needs wind in my beanie. But when Oracle causes so much disruption in the IT vendor market landscape, you have to wonder what it means to their customers.

So I?m on a mission. I have been talking to dozens of Oracle customers trying to understand what their major challenges are and what they are doing to address them.? I will continue these customer conversations and will share (what they let me share) in this blog the net-net of their constant love-hate? relationship with Oracle. Starting today continuing in a weekly series.

ESG research illustrates that IT?s top priorities are: increasing server virtualization, managing data growth, information security initiatives, and new application deployments and/or upgrades.? Staying inline with one of these topics, I asked end-users to relax on my ?virtual? couch and tell me what keeps them up at night.

Picking a topic, the first company I met with chose managing performance-related issues because of Big Data in their Oracle E-Business Suite (OEBS) application.

Oracle has always been in the Big Data market?they just called it VLDBs (Very Large Databases)?taking massive volumes of data (?bring it on,? one customer says)? and turning chaos into structured, organized bits of information.? All done in a way to support the most demanding business processes.

A multi-billion dollar discrete manufacturing organization runs Oracle E-Business Suite (OEBS), Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), and Hyperion.? Their production database is over 2 Terabytes and they make several copies to support their application development processes.? They run EMC storage and have no plans to move to Exadata (topic for another blog).? They leverage storage-based replication for their disaster recovery and business continuity processes and also to facilitate standing up test and development environments quickly (in less than a day).

Their highest IT priority is an upcoming R12 OEBS upgrade with data volumes and growth their number one concern.? They run their entire manufacturing process on OEBS and for every minute the application isn?t running, they jeopardize their ability to ship product on time.? Managing data volumes and the expected increase in growth rates associated with their R12 upgrade has caused this organization to take a look at solutions like database archiving, database tiering, and a data partitioning strategy.? Oracle doesn?t support database partitioning in many of the packaged applications this organization has deployed.

Oracle does not make it easy for customers who want to take data out of their production database?this manufacturing company included.? Deleting data using SQL DELETE statements is an expensive operation in terms of CPU and storage IO consumption.? So how do organizations manage data growth in their database applications? Other than upgrading their servers and buying more storage (resulting in more database license revenue for the database vendor), what options are there?

In my recent Market Landscape Report Managing Data Growth, I take a pass at documenting what those options are?including the pros and cons of each (available to subscribing clients and to all end-users who register on our site).? If you have experience with these solutions, send me your comments.? Or have you deployed other approaches? I want to hear about them all.

Managing data growth is a problem for almost every company I have met or spoken with so far.? While archiving is just one approach for controlling data volumes, it isn?t the only option.? I plan to attend the Archive and Purge SIG which will be at Oracle OpenWorld, Session ID? 27900? on? Sunday, October 2, 10 a.m. ? 11 a.m. in Room 3005.? I plan to be there to share what organizations have shared with me.

Next up?virtualizing database applications?another source of contention for customers who have a love-hate relationship with Oracle.

All views and opinions expressed in ESG blog posts are intended to be those of the post's author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., or its clients. ESG bloggers do not and will not engage in any form of paid-for blogging. Click to see our complete Disclosure Policy.

Source: http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2011/07/love-hate-relationships-between-oracle-and-their-customers/

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