Oracle Magazine 2012

I didn’t count the number of conversa-tions I had or heard that included the word, but I’m quite comfortable saying that cloudwas the word of the week at Oracle’s conferences and events in San Francisco, California, September 29 through October 5, 2012. There were announcements focused explicitly on Oracle cloud technologies and solutions, but cloud was also a big part of every Oracle product, technology, and service announcement and discussion.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s Sunday keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 was about cloud computing, including the history of cloud computing going back to NetSuite in 1998 and the beginnings of Oracle Fusion Applications development in 2004. Ellison discussed public and private clouds, the levels of cloud services—software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—and their key components, and Oracle’s latest offerings in each of these service areas.

Ellison talked about Oracle technologies designed specifically for better cloud com-puting, from infrastructure and private cloud services to database multitenancy and engi-neered systems. He also unveiled the latest Oracle engineered systems releases and discussed their infrastructure and platform support for cloud computing.

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Oracle Magazinepublishes some small amount of Oracle news every 60 days, and that’s not an apology or false modesty on behalf of the magazine. Oracle generates far more news about products, strategy, and tech-nology in a two-month period than we could possibly fit in the pages of this publication. (Take a look at the Oracle press release feed at pressroom.oracle.com to see what I mean—and to search for the latest Oracle news.)

Information technology news is also the kind of news that benefits from several dif-ferent approaches, formats, and presenta-tions. Oracle Magazinestrives to present Oracle news in news briefs and interviews, community briefs, customer reference stories, technology how-to content, and anal-ysis. But even these variations are not enough to guarantee that organizations have the news they need to see the potential impact the latest Oracle products, strategy, and tech-nology could have on their own operations.

Fortunately, as the volume of news about Oracle and Oracle technology has continued to expand, it has gotten easier to sepa-rate into components and address with a tighter focus. The aforementioned Oracle press releases are now broken into bite-size bullets, suitable as launch points for social media conversations. Oracle Web pages, data sheets, white papers, customer case studies, and newer-media assets including podcasts, Webcasts, and videos present new infor-mation in all sizes, to fit the time you have and the approach you’re looking for when exploring any area of Oracle technology.

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The ComputerWorld article gives examples of the many types of information contained in tables on the Web and points out that pro-gramming languages have developed features specifically for working with information in tables. The hard part of the “data stored in tables” truth presented in the article appears to be that tables are not new, but rather are years-old constructs that have organized the information of the internet in clearly defined structures. The article also points out that NoSQL isnew, but the hard truth there is that NoSQL is also about data in tables.

To me, the fact that most of the Web is data stored in tables is fantastic. The down-side to that truth is that only mostof the Web is in tables. And as for the hard truth that even a newer technology like NoSQL works with data in tables, I see only benefit in adding new capabilities for the structures that already contain most of the information of the Web.

Like many people, I’ve counted on tables—on the Web and in intranet applica-tions—for Web transactions and interactions as well as for storage and access to various types of information for years. For internal projects, I’ve used relational database tables in situations where I first did not understand how using tables would help, but in each case the truth was that using the tables was convenient and definitely added value to both the process and the result.

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Each issue of Oracle Magazinecollects different editorial content in familiar sections and a particular order. And just as every editorial piece is designed to have an interesting beginning, a constructive middle, and a conclusive end, the various sections of the magazine are arranged for a similar flow. From Up Front, At Oracle, and Community to Features, Technology, and Comment, the idea is to give the magazine a beginning that makes you want to pick it up (in print), click it (for digital), or tap it open (for mobile distributions); a middle that provides infor-mation and awareness about Oracle and the Oracle community; and an end that makes you look forward to the next issue.

The beginning of each issue, the very first section and page, is key to getting readers to pick up or open the magazine. And that beginning is the cover. The discussion about what story to put on the cover of this particular issue of the magazine was a brief one. How to put that story—featuring Marvel’s The Avengers—on the cover was a much longer conversation. The solution: this issue of Oracle Magazinehas been published with six different covers, each highlighting one of the Marvel super heroes. Each cover version is numbered—1 through 6—in the “Special Collector’s Issue” logo.

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My search for clarity on big data began a couple of years ago, and the initial challenges were many. First, as an editor, I often query or delete the word bigin descriptions of technology problems and solutions, because bigas a descriptor in enterprise technology doesn’t usually add much value. (In Oracle Magazine’s coverage of enterprise-class Oracle platforms, frameworks, and tools that manage the ever-growing volumes and types of structured and unstructured data in today’s information explosion, the word big may also be redundant.)

Second, in my initial search for definitions and descriptions of big data, I found what seemed to be different definitions from dif-ferent companies. And although I also found some comfort in editorial content substan-tiating my opinion that the definitions of big data at the time were variable, that same content didn’t help with my understanding of big data as a technology.

Finally, the examples of information included in big data stores and the tech-nologies that used them were as variable as big data’s definitions. And most examples seemed to be presented as new data silos for specific industries, making the applica-tion of an example to another industry a challenging task.

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Some things defy description. And sometimes trying to describe such things helps to make that point. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams has such a description: “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” When people who have never been to Oracle OpenWorld ask me to describe it, I often borrow from Adams and begin my description with “Oracle OpenWorld is big.”

I usually then go on to number the different venues, the street closures, the hotels, the tents, the attendees, and so on. After Oracle OpenWorld 2011, however, I’m going to start mentioning the number of industrydisrupting news announcements that come out of this event.

A typical Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco experience is a collection of news, education, networking, socializing, sightseeing, and more. In the area of news, Oracle OpenWorld is a launchpad for Oracle and its partners to make really big announcements, a place for everyone to take in that information, and an opportunity for all manner of media to comment on it. Oracle OpenWorld 2011 certainly did not disappoint anyone looking for big news.

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