6 Benefits of a Cloud Data Warehouse

Let’s explore these key topics one by one.

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Question 1 - Do you even want a data warehouse in the cloud?

Of course you do! Look at how fast your data warehouse is growing. Look at the growing number of requests building up for new data warehouse projects, new data discovery sandboxes, new departmental marts, faster query response times, etc. Every IT department is looking for a silver bullet that can magically help them meet the growing demands for data access coming their business units. That silver bullet would be cloud.

Question 2: What can you expect from a cloud data warehouse and what are the key benefits? There are many, but we’ve identified the top six benefits for you.

Data Warehouse Cloud Benefit #1: Lower Costs With Elasticity

The biggest reason most people move to a data warehouse in the cloud is cost. Storing data on-premise, in your own data center, can get very expensive. And expanding your data footprint often makes it harder to support all of your ever-expanding analytical needs.

Why? Well with an on-premise data warehouse, you can’t independently scale compute and storage - at least not that quickly or easily. Typically, if you need more storage the compute will come with it and you end up having to pay for both.

In addition, you need to purchase as much compute as you need for peak times. So if you’re a retail company worried about how much compute you need to handle Black Friday, well, tough luck—you’re stuck with that much compute for the whole year.  

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

With the best kind of data warehouse, your system can instantly and flexibly scale to deliver as much or as little compute is necessary, whenever it is that you need it. And, because compute and storage are separate, you only need to purchase what’s essential. Lastly, you also don’t have as many upfront costs—hardware, server rooms, networking, adding extra staff, etc.

Data Warehouse Cloud Benefit #2: Quick to Deploy

In the past, IT teams had to estimate how much storage and compute power would be necessary for their line of business teams—sometimes three years in advance. Getting this information incorrect would mean buying hardware they didn’t need, or facing complaints if there was a lack of storage.

Today, this complicated, detailed planning-and-estimation process isn’t necessary. With the cloud, business users can build their own data warehouse, data mart, or sandbox in only minutes, at any time (night or day). Having a data warehouse in the cloud allows organizations to pay for only the resources they need—when they need it.

In addition, Oracle’s cloud makes it quicker and easier to roll out new data warehouse projects such as data discovery sandboxes. IT and business teams can develop and/or prototype new services and products without spending large sums of money on infrastructure.

Data Warehouse Cloud Benefit #3: Grow Your Capabilities

Having a data warehouse in the cloud improves the overall value of the data warehouse. It means that business intelligence and other applications can deliver faster, smarter insights to the business since the availability, scalability and performance are better.

As Penny Avril, VP of Product Management said: “The value of the business is driven by data, and by the usage of the data. For many companies, the data is the only real capital they have. Oracle is making it easier for the C-level to manage and use that data. That should help the bottom line.”

With a data warehouse in the cloud, you can engage in the full spectrum of data warehousing from business analytics, data integration, IoT, and more as a complete, integrated solution.

Data Warehouse Cloud Benefit #4: Self-Service Data Warehousing

Self-service is only truly possible if you have a self-driving database. Just as the cloud data warehouse has many benefits, a self-driving, autonomous data warehouse offers even more benefits. Essentially, you don't really have to worry about managing the data warehouse anymore. 

And that means you can benefit from fully automated management, fully automated patching, and upgrades. It means as business user, you don’t need IT to spin up a new data mart for you. You simply log into the cloud and provision a new data warehouse yourself, in minutes.

Data is more available and accessible than ever before.

This allows IT teams to focus attention and resources on more strategic aspects of providing value to the business. But this doesn’t mean that DBAs will be out of work—they still have to manage how applications connect to the data warehouse and how developers use the in-database features and functions within their application code.

Data Warehouse Cloud Benefit #5: More Secure Data

In the past, people were convinced that on-premises data warehouses were more secure. But in the same way that they now trust digital copies more than physical paper copies, some are beginning to see a data warehouse in the cloud as more secure than an on-premises system.

But obviously, it all depends on the database company. So choose a company that has a business model that relies on data security and encryption. Preferably, that company should have over four decades of experience with entire departments to protecting your most valuable asset ... Hmmm, who could that be? 

Just as an aside, with our self-driving database, the Autonomous Data Warehouse, we have strong data encryption switched on by default to ensure your data is fully protected.

Data Warehouse Cloud Benefit #6: The Cloud Itself

A self-driving database makes everything easier: it takes care of much of the dull but highly valuable work that most people don’t want to do. A self-driving database will help you gain even more ability and capability in the cloud.

For many customers, adopting a data warehouse is just one step on a multi-step journey. You need to make sure that your cloud provider offers a complete path to the cloud that encompasses integrated IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions.

You can simplify your IT infrastructure and minimize capital investments by utilizing your cloud’s services for infrastructure, data management, applications, and business intelligence.

When it comes to choosing a cloud, make sure the one you pick allows for flexible deployment models, enabling you to seamlessly migrate your IT workloads from an on-premises data center to the cloud and back again.

Source: oracle.com

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Oracle APEX and ORDS now under the Oracle Free Use Terms and Conditions license

In a continuous effort to make Oracle technologies more accessible to the developer community, we are happy to announce today the removal of the click-through license agreement and the relicensing of Oracle Application Express (APEX) and Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) under the Oracle Free Use Terms and Conditions (FUTC) license.

This change follows the path of the already relicensed Oracle Database 18c Express Edition (February 2020) and Oracle SQLcl command-line interface (May 2021).

What does this license change mean?

With the Oracle Free Use Terms and Conditions license, users will no longer have to click on a "license agreement" box on the website prior to download. Instead, the binaries will be openly accessible on the web and can be downloaded directly via the following URLs:

◉ APEX: https://download.oracle.com/otn_software/apex/apex-latest.zip

◉ ORDS: https://download.oracle.com/otn_software/java/ords/ords-latest.zip

This makes it easier than ever to consume these technologies directly, in an automated fashion, or in a CI/CD environment.

For a full list of the rights of the FUTC license, see either the license file within the software archive itself or here: https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/oracle-free-license.html

Oracle continues its commitment to the community and will base future releases of APEX and ORDS under the Free Use Terms and Conditions license as well.

About APEX

Using APEX, developers can quickly develop and deploy compelling apps that solve real problems and provide immediate value. You won't need to be an expert in a vast array of technologies to deliver sophisticated solutions. Focus on solving the problem and let APEX take care of the rest.

About ORDS

Oracle REST Data Services bridges HTTPS and your Oracle Database. A mid-tier Java application, ORDS provides a Database Management REST API, SQL Developer Web, a PL/SQL Gateway, SODA for REST, and the ability to publish RESTful Web Services for interacting with the data and stored procedures in your Oracle Database.

Source: oracle.com

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Do you want innovation or product breadth? Oracle Database is tops in both, a data security industry report finds

Analyst firm Kuppinger Cole has reaffirmed for its clients that Oracle is the top innovator and overall leader in data security for the third consecutive year. Find resources below for securing your own digital systems.

In 2021, if you work with your company’s digital systems, you know that data security is a top concern. Tech advisory firm, Kuppinger Cole recently looked across the database industry to help its clients make better choices for the tools they use to manage and secure data. The firm looked at products and services that protect data from every form of compromise, whether that’s simple human error or inappropriate access privileges, or more overt threats like malware, phishing, and other types of cyberattacks. Kuppinger Cole also studied how the technology can help improve compliance with a raft of regulation about data protection and privacy. In their published report, Leadership Compass: Database and Big Data Security (.pdf), the firm found that Oracle is once again the overall leader. 

When looking at tech products, companies often have to choose between getting a broad and well-established product, or going for innovation from an upstart. Kuppinger Cole ranks Oracle as the leader for both breadth of offering and innovation—while AWS and Microsoft Azure are tied for 7th place.  

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From the report: “The breadth of the company’s database security portfolio is impressive: With multiple protection and detection products and managed services covering all aspects of database assessment, protection, monitoring, and compliance, Oracle Database Security can address the most complex customer requirements, both on-premises and in the cloud.”

A key component of the Oracle’s continued leadership, said the report, is its pace of innovation, led by the Oracle Autonomous Database. The report also noted that, "...both AWS and Microsoft are large and respectable cloud service providers, databases and database security are not their primary focus.”

Oracle Autonomous Database “completely automates provisioning, management, tuning, and upgrade processes of database instances without any downtime, not just substantially increases security and compliance of sensitive data stored in Oracle databases but makes a compelling argument for moving this data to the Oracle cloud,” says the report.

In 2020, the company has expanded its autonomous offering by introducing new features within Autonomous Databases (such as JSON) as well as additional on-prem and cloud-based security services like [Autonomous] Data Guard for disaster protection.”

Perhaps the most notable addition to Oracle’s offerings, notes the report, “is the Data Safe service for comprehensive database risk assessment, including configuration drift detection, user risk assessment, activity audit, sensitive data discovery, and static masking.” The report also notes that Oracle offers full feature parity for Autonomous Database in the cloud, on-premises, and via Oracle Cloud@Customer, its “managed private cloud service.”

Read Kuppinger Cole’s full report.

Source: oracle.com

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Sharding Oracle Database Cloud Service

Oracle Sharding is now available in Oracle Cloud with Oracle Database Cloud Service as well as Kubernetes and Docker containers (OKE).

Oracle Sharding enables hyperscale, globally distributed, converged databases. It supports applications that require linear scalability, elasticity, fault isolation and geographic distribution of data for data sovereignty.

It does so by distributing chunks of a data set across independent Oracle databases (shards). Shards can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises and require no specialized hardware or software.

The following figure shows a table horizontally partitioned across three shards.

Figure 1-1 Horizontal Partitioning of a Table Across Shards

Benefits of Sharding

◉ Linear Scalability. Sharding eliminates performance bottlenecks and makes it possible to linearly scale performance and capacity by adding shards.

◉ Fault Containment. Sharding is a shared nothing hardware infrastructure that eliminates single points of failure, such as shared disk, SAN, and clusterware, and provides strong fault isolation—the failure or slow-down of one shard does not affect the performance or availability of other shards.

◉ Geographical Distribution of Data. Sharding makes it possible to store particular data close to its consumers and satisfy regulatory requirements when data must be located in a particular jurisdiction.

◉ Rolling Upgrades. Applying configuration changes on one shard at a time does not affect other shards, and allows administrators to first test the changes on a small subset of data.

Unlike NoSQL solutions, Oracle Sharding provides strong data consistency, the full power of SQL, support for structured and unstructured data, and the Oracle Database ecosystem.

Source: oracle.com

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Introducing Autonomous Data Tools

In this post we introduce some important new features that are now available with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, or ADW for short. There will be plenty more material that goes into these in far more detail, but this is a brief overview of these new capabilities.

We've made the database administrators’ life easy with Autonomous Data Warehouse, taking the drudgery out of the job, and freeing up time to do higher value work. But there are other users of the database–data analysts, application developers, and data scientists, too. We didn't think it was fair to leave them out in the cold, so we've built a suite of tools right into Autonomous Data Warehouse, to extend the benefits of autonomy to these users as well.

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As an ADW user, it's all right there, at your fingertips, with nothing more to buy and nothing more to install. We know you've got a plethora of data sources to wrangle–apps, databases, files and more–and a vast array of things you want to do with all that data. We know you expect more than a flashing SQL prompt to do it all with–and the Autonomous Data Warehouse tools we aim to include everything you need and nothing you don't. There are tools for Data Load and Transformation, Business Modeling (to make sense of all that data), Data Insights (so you don't need to go looking for a needle in a haystack). There's a Catalog too, and tools for Machine Learning, Spatial, and Graph; plus of course SQL Developer Web and APEX for low-code application development.

So get ready, because the next time you log into your Autonomous Data Warehouse, you'll see a far richer tool palette awaits you after you click on the new Database Actions card.

Over time we'll be adding more and more tools to this suite. I want to talk about a few of them now, just to whet your appetite.

There's a Data Load tool. Anyone that's tried to load data knows that it's more easily said than done–until now, that is.

Just say what you want to do–load data into your ADW, link to data in a remote location or even set up a live feed. Then say where your data is–in a local file, a remote database or in an object store in some Cloud–and press go. That's it. Future posts will explore this feature in more depth.

Sometimes your data is just right, and sometimes you need to clean it up a bit–sometimes quite a lot. That's where the Data Transforms tool comes in.

All the power of Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), with a nice, clean, modern web-UI simple enough even for me to use. It's just what you want. Drag and drop to say what you want to do. Don't worry about how to do it–the tool does all that hard work for you.

So, what's next? You can only go so far looking at raw data. Before long you want a semantic model on top of it. That's where our Business Model tool comes in.

We've made it simple to build sophisticated models on your data, by identifying dimensions, hierarchies and measures; with a nice clean way of saying how to aggregate–sum, average or whatever. But wait, there's more. We make it fast, too! Simple SQL written against the business model is re-written to ensure optimal data access, and because we know about the hierarchical structure of the data, we can pre-aggregate the totals and sub-totals you want, before you've even told us you want them!

Next comes a feature I wanted to call the electromagnet, but they didn't let me. An analyst's job can often feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. So, throw the switch and all that metallic stuff is going to slam up on to that electromagnet. Sure, there are going to be rusty old nails and screws and nuts and bolts, but there are going to be a few needles as well. It's far easier to pick the needles out of these few bits of metal than go rummaging around in a pile of hay–especially if you have allergies! That's more or less how our Insights tool works. Load your data, kick off a query and grab a cup of coffee. Autonomous Data Warehouse does all the hard work, scouring through this data looking for hidden patterns, anomalies and outliers. We run some analytic queries that predict expected values, and where the actual values differ significantly from expectation, the tool presents them here.

Some of these might be uninteresting or obvious, but some are worthy of further investigation. You get this dashboard of various exceptional data patterns.

Drill down on a specific bar chart in this dashboard, and significant deviations between actual and expected values are highlighted.

Data is Capital and the built-in Catalog allows you to maximize its value. Data Lineage and Impact Analysis are now at your fingertips in this integrated tool.

Can you imagine buying a new car without Bluetooth, airbags, electric windows or cup holders? These are among the basic requirements in the modern generation of cars, but when I was a boy, cars didn’t even have seatbelts!

With Autonomous Data Warehouse we usher in a new generation of Database Cloud Service. And with this new generation, just as with previous generations of database, we raise the threshold for minimal required functionality. Autonomous operations by themselves represent a generational breakthrough, but we believe that more is required. For this new generation of database cloud service–the autonomous generation–all users of the service require embedded functionality. All this should be built in, with nothing more to buy and nothing more to install.

Source: oracle.com

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Analytics in Finance – Where do YOU stand?

“We have always done it that way”. “Our situation is unique”. Sound familiar? Many people in finance don’t have the time to question the process they follow month in and month out. Usually, we would say finance is all about maximizing revenue and profitability, balancing cash flow and spend, monitoring risk, and return on investments. However, plans have changed, expectations have reset, and 2020 may have even exposed some issues that need to be addressed.

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One of the keys to success is the ability for organizations to be agile and respond quickly as needed. As a matter of fact, organizations that invested more in digital technology than their peers during the crisis were “twice as likely to report revenue growth than executives at other companies.” (IDG global IT Leaders Research Report, 2020). At the very least, flexible solutions and analytics processes driven by the latest technologies contribute to that needed agility. So where does your Finance organization stand? Have you already modernized your analytics? Does your organization have what it needs to thrive?

We have prepared a short self-assessment tool that allows you to evaluate and take a snapshot of how you use analytics in finance. This assessment should serve as an easy way to get started gathering the proper information and understanding where you stand. Let’s first answer some background questions…

WHEN is the right time to modernize?

Clearly, we are going to say “NOW” is the right time to evaluate and decide on a modernization path. We understand that some businesses may be back in a growth mode while others are still planning their journey. Whether you start to modernize immediately or wait for several more months, preparing yourself and evaluating how modernization can impact your business is worth doing right away.

WHAT financial analytic processes should you be looking to evaluate? 

The answer to this question depends on your role. As mentioned, the self-assessment helps you evaluate how your organization uses analytics in finance. We present questions to help you evaluate and score the financial processes which are most important based on the role you select.

Do you already perform Scenario Modeling? What innovation techniques would you say your finance organization employs? What is most important to you: revenue analytics, cost analytics, or full profitability reporting? Have you undertaken digital transformation or are you still balancing older on-prem systems? This assessment provides quick and easy follow-up information within the areas you might need to improve.

Figure 1: You get to select your series of questions based on your role in finance

 

WHY should you be evaluating your company?

It always helps to take a step back and consider all of your daily tasks. Are they easy and worthwhile or difficult and bureaucratic? Could they be more effective? We want to provide that opportunity and at the same time give you some questions you may not have considered. As you go through the short assessment you will be asked a series of six questions: from data onboarding and preparation to how you handle enterprise analytic reporting or monitoring business performance.

Figure 2: An example of the assessment question and visual.

HOW do you get started? By taking the Analytics for Finance self-assessment.

The assessment is here. The answers are in your hands. Have at it! Take the assessment as many times as you would like or for different roles. The questions will be different based on role, and suggestions for additional information are provided each time.

Figure 3: Links to additional information

With the information provided, we know you will uncover new ideas and help your organization move forward. It may be as simple as improving a process, or as eventful as modernizing your financial software. Please reach out if you need specific follow up and let us know in the comments how you like it!

Source: oracle.com

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